ABSTRACT
Efforts to pre-emptively control space and order people have been ushered in on a global scale. Exemplifying these efforts, anti-masking laws have been presented as a ‘tool’ that would enable law enforcers and law makers to more quickly and efficiently identify and process riots. Drawing on Access to Information and Freedom of Information releases, news reports, and parliamentary debates, this chapter analyses the discursive construction of pre-emptive control and logics of anticipation that grounded initial discussions of anti-masking law in the Canadian context. It is argued that masks were made a key indicator of violent intent at public demonstrations; an indicator, used to both construct and subsequently identify the illegal and the unlawful. Rather than criminalizing an action – the wearing of a mask – the law more problematically widens the net, capturing populations both violating and adhering to the law. Anti-masking legislation becomes a way of targeting groups, creating criminal records, and ordering bodies. By criminalizing practices of public invisibility, these indicators optimize the surveillance-ready-subject, formally requiring bodies to become standardized data portraits that are interoperable with other systems of identifying criminality.
