Canadian Government Web Scraping: An Introduction (Eastern Time Friendly)

How Ottawa Is Watching You Online
Presented by Maple Leaks
Date & Time: [Insert Date], 6:00 – 7:30 PM MT
Location: Online (private link provided after registration)
Duration: 1 hour talk + open Q&A
Capacity: 100 participants
🎟️ Ticket: $5 CAD (fee waiver available – see below)

📡 What happens when the government becomes the scraper?

This is the first in a new public-interest series exploring how the Canadian federal government uses automated web scraping to monitor websites, harvest metadata, and quietly surveil access-to-information requesters, activists, and researchers—often without public oversight or policy transparency.

Based on forensic server data, metadata behavior patterns, and active federal litigation, this talk will walk participants through:

• Concrete evidence of federal scraping and asset pulling from civil society websites

• Identifiable IP blocks tied to Library and Archives Canada, Shared Services Canada, Innovation Canada, and others

• How a single Privacy Act request triggered multi-week surveillance behaviors

• The tools and tactics used to track FOI-related targets at scale

• What to watch for in your own server logs, and how to prepare for Part II of this series

This session is designed for anyone interested in the edges of state surveillance, metadata analysis, or FOI activism. No technical background required.

💵 Ticket: $5 CAD

All proceeds will go toward funding future access-to-information requests via the Federation for Accountability, Freedom, and Oversight (FAFO Labs).
FAFO Labs is not (yet) a nonprofit—just a civic experiment in shared FOI infrastructure, co-founded by transparency advocates and public-interest researchers.

📬 Can’t pay?
No problem. Just email learning@primerogueinc.com and ask for a free ticket—no questions asked. Everyone deserves access and we’ll be happy to give you a promo code to redeem a ticket or send you a ticket directly.

🔐 Access Restrictions:

This event is not open to employees or contractors of the Government of Canada or any affiliated institution.
Registrations from government accounts will be canceled without refund. For questions and/or unlikely potential exemptions regarding this policy, please contact countersurveillance@primerogueinc.com. We will hold a future event open to Government of Canada employees, contractors and affiliates should demand exist but our primary goal is to create a safe space for attendees.

👤 About the Speaker:

Kevin J.S. Duska Jr. is the President of Prime Rogue Inc and a Director of Maple Leaks, and a very active ATIA/FOI requester. He is also the lead applicant in multiple Federal Court challenges alleging unlawful metadata surveillance and procedural bias against requesters. His investigations have documented repeated government scraping of FOI-related websites—including his own.

This is Part I of our Watching the Watchers series.
Future sessions will explore blacklisting, Section 6.1 weaponization, AI-enabled surveillance, and countermeasures.

Reserve your seat. Review your logs. They’re watching—you should be too.