Sweet Caroline, Sweet SSC: Watching You Watching Me About CFB Wainwright

The Government of Canada spent a Wednesday morning reading Prime Rogue. Staff page twice. Contact page once. The Wainwright fire files over and over. We are flattered. We would also like an answer to a single email.

By Kevin J.S. Duska Jr. (Signal: Rubicon49.50) | Prime Rogue Inc/The Signal Cage| Calgary, AB | October 28, 2026

Key Facts

• On Oct. 28, 2026, computers on Government of Canada networks run by Shared Services Canada opened 30 pages of primerogueinc.com between 8:07 a.m. and 12:50 p.m. Ottawa time; 35 over Oct. 26–28.
• They read Prime Rogue’s CFB Wainwright fire coverage, its staff page twice and its contact page once.
• The Department of National Defence has not answered Prime Rogue’s written questions on the Oct. 17 fire, beyond one holding statement.
• Prime Rogue shows a joke banner to SSC networks only. It blocks no one and identifies no individual.
• A shared SSC internet address can’t be tied to one department or person.

A Cool Winter Morning at Wilco’s Lair

It is 6:07 in the morning in Calgary and I am awake for no good reason. That’s not atypical.

The dog is on the hardwood. She prefers it to the bed I paid for – she actually has four beds – and we only have 3 floors. The coffee is bad. K-Cup level bad. The laptop is the only light in the room – well aside from the other four desktop PCs.

In Ottawa it is 8:07, and somebody on a Government of Canada computer has just opened my company’s homepage.

I know this because I built a little machine that tells me. It sits in front of the website and watches the door. It’s called a “worker.” I like my little worker. They are a very good worker. They are one of many such workers but this one is mine. When a visitor walks in from a federal network, it writes down the time, the address and the page. If the visitor comes from Shared Services Canada, it also hangs a banner across the top of the site. A beaver. My dog. A joke about access to information, signed v/r, Wilco the Dog, Chief Morale Officer.

I watch them watching me.

That is the whole song.

P.S. If you find the beaver analytics dashboard, the password is 42069 – because I’m a child – and everything else is gated tighter than… let’s not go there.

Liner notes: about the banner

Before anyone in Ottawa files a ticket, here is exactly what we did. It’s mostly a joke.

Our website sits behind Cloudflare, like millions of others. We added a small script, a Cloudflare Worker, that looks at one thing every website already sees: which network a visitor is coming from. If that network is registered to Shared Services Canada, the department that runs internet access for most of the federal government, the script adds a banner to the top of the page.

The banner is bilingual – we respect both official languages – and I speak them both fluently. It has a cartoon beaver and a photo of my dog. It makes a joke about access to information. It thanks Canadian Armed Forces members for their service. It’s signed by Wilco, our Chief Morale Officer, who is a dog and takes her job very seriously.

That’s it. Here’s what the script does not do:

• It doesn’t block anyone. Every page loads in full, banner or not.
• It doesn’t identify anyone. A federal network address is shared by thousands of public servants. We see the network, never the person.
• It doesn’t collect anything new. Time, network address, page and browser type land in every website’s server logs. The script just sets the government-network ones aside.
• Everyone else sees nothing. Readers on home internet, phones or VPNs, public servants included, get the normal site.

Why bother? Partly because I have an open file with the federal privacy commissioner about a federal office (BAD ISED, BAD) looking at my personal websites, so I was curious who else drops by. A few federal institutions have been found, subsequent to complaints I have made, to have violated the Privacy Act by using information from ATIP and Privacy Act requests to “creep” requesters. I haven’t written it up yet. It’s in my next book. But why? Mostly because it’s funny. A government that keeps us waiting months for records can wait one second for a beaver.

Verse one: Wednesday morning, Ottawa

Here is what one federal desk did with its morning, all times Ottawa:

• 8:07 Homepage via Google.
• 8:08 The staff page. Who are these people.
• 8:15 Prime Rogue Updates.
• 8:19 The Canadian Armed Forces category, then our piece on the missing GPS trail and the Range Control logs from the CFB Wainwright fire. At 8:19 and 25 seconds, their computer pulls down the banner image. The beaver says hello. The dog says hello.
• 8:22 Our exclusive satellite images of the burn. Then the weather-station timeline.
• 8:25 Homepage, twice, two seconds apart. A refresh. Maybe a double-take.
• 8:36 The shop. The staff page again. Then Dead Code Walking, our new series on quantum security, and four seconds later its first issue.
• 8:37 A Mac on the same address. Somebody else has joined the party. They typed the link in directly.
• 9:00 The contact page.
• 9:05 The quantum piece again. Then an April column on the Iran ceasefire.
• 9:15 The quantum piece a third time (maybe it’s really good?)
• 9:17 Back to the Range Control logs.
• 9:31 The series page. The shop again.
• 10:13 and 10:16 Two homepage visits from a different federal block. That block’s neighbouring public servers all carry Treasury Board Secretariat names. That’s a neighbourhood, not a fingerprint. I note it and I don’t lean on it.
• 11:36 The Mac goes back to the shop.
• 12:50 Somebody opens one of the access-to-information releases we publish in full, a PDF from August 2025.

The staff page twice. The contact page once. The shop three times. Nobody bought a mug – we don’t sell mugs so that’s fine.

Chorus: the part where the crowd answers

You know the song. Neil Diamond, 1969. It’s the one they play in the eighth inning at Fenway, and that the Brits, oh those Brits, they love to sing it twelve pints deep. The trick of it isn’t the verse. It’s that the crowd answers. The band leaves a gap and thirty-seven thousand people fill it with noise.

We can’t print the words. Copyright doesn’t care how many pints you’ve had. So we’ll let the experts do it for us: the Green and White Army, Northern Ireland’s travelling support, very drunk and very loud in Lyon at Euro 2016. Northern Ireland – well – we write about that too – and my grandmother would say a prayer every night for Bobby Sands – but I digress – again.

There you go. Every word, word-perfect, from people who can’t have known which day it was. That’s more than Ottawa has managed in eleven days.

One more thing about that title. The federal official whose job is making government answer is the Information Commissioner of Canada. Her name is Caroline Maynard. You can’t make this up. We didn’t. Commissioner Maynard spends her days telling departments to answer people sooner – albeit very slowly. We hear you, Caroline. We’re humming along. Also, a chapter in my forthcoming book “Echo State”, about the OIC, is called “Sweet Caroline.” What a coincidence.

That’s the deal. Call and response.

I make calls. Since the night four soldiers died at Wainwright on October 17, I have sent the Department of National Defence written questions again and again. Polite ones. Numbered ones. Questions with deadlines, sent under the Canadian Association of Journalists’ ethics guidelines, so the department can answer before we publish. We tell them we will print whatever they send, in full.

The gap stays empty.

On the night of the fire, DND sent one holding statement five minutes after my first email, then a reminder about a press conference at which my phone connection was embarrassingly bad (mind you I had never called into a national presser before – so really fucking bad), and then a very nice follow-up by a very nice human explaining to me how I could join. I wished her a “wonderful day.” She did the same – she seemed very nice – genuinely – comms shop folks are human beings – don’t forget that. But, yes, DND said safety was a priority. It answered none of the seven questions.

I asked them to mark each question “no comment” so I could report their position fairly. Nothing. I sent nine more the next day. Nothing. Environment Canada declined to discuss its own public weather bulletins, citing the investigation, then it did.

Fair is fair: Parks Canada answered in writing, on the record. And DND let me onto its October 22 technical briefing, where I got one question. as well as a garbled follow-up in, to the very stoic General Rutland. The answer was narrower than the question. We’ve sent about a dozen requests for comment to DND – we have received no substantial responses – but we thank DND for the press conference link.

As I write this, the deadline on our latest request is a couple of hours away. It asks about the fire and the satellite imagery we bought from a commercial vendor. It will be v5 of our Fire Recontruction Model – Rubicon Ridge – published as soon as the deadline passes. We will then examine the air response to the incident with V5.1 Rubicon Air – I love Cato – but like – I’m not falling on a sword y’all.

I’ll be watching the inbox. They’ll be watching the site. Somebody should blink first.

Verse two: we welcome it. Truly.

Let me be clear, because someone in Ottawa will read this paragraph twice.

Nobody did anything wrong. Public servants are allowed to read the news. They’re supposed to. Governments pay real money for this. The Treasury Board Secretariat has bought software to monitor media and social media in near real time. The Privy Council Office’s Media Centre has a licensing contract running into 2028 so it can lawfully monitor broadcasts. Reading us is part of somebody’s job. In fact, and I swear I’m not plugging my book Echo State, I’ve been researching exactly this since March, 2025, and let’s be real, that’s the actual creepy shit.

But, good! Read us! Read us twice – we don’t give a flying fuck if you an ad blocker. We don’t make real money that way – but we can’t run a blog without an expectation of… something my accountant told me. Read the Range Control piece a third time! Check the staff page. We’re all real. The dog is real too. She has a title. She was found on a roadside in Vulcan and now she’s probably enough of a BMF to scare the men of JTF2 – if they started letting women in – tip us off – that would be awesome.

SSC/DND- we are not mad that you’re watching. We are confused that watching is all you do. Also, not for nothing, thanks to all those who serve, and to the first responders from that day.

Because here’s the thing about the logs. They show a person who went to our contact page at 9:00 a.m. That is the page that tells you how to reach us. They had the address. They had the morning.

The federal communications policy says departments must give the public information that is accurate, objective and timely. Somebody in the building has read that policy too. Probably on a Wednesday – I would think. I only think that because there’s a Wednesday every week, or so the Germans would have us believe. What I just did there, that’s called foreshadowing.

Bridge: the ones I can’t see

The federal readers are the polite ones. They arrive on Edge, and that’s the only gross part here (SERIOUSLY – EDGE???), from Ottawa or Gatineau, during office hours, and they set off the banner.

The rest of the crowd doesn’t knock.

All my server catches automatically is what comes off a government network with no VPN and no middleman. Behind that is everything else. Rotating proxy pools that poll the Wainwright pages on a schedule, address after address, the same proxy software on different hosting companies, the paying customer hidden behind all of it. A burst from Microsoft’s cloud that started rendering our pages 83 seconds after a federal reader arrived, the way a link scanner does when somebody pastes a URL into an email. I can’t prove who was on the other end. I can only tell you the timing, and the fact that ATIP shows the government uses multiple vendors for this.

And the AI crawlers. They come in like a bus tour that never gets off the bus. Cloudflare, which sits in front of a big slice of the internet, 20% I think (not fact checked because this is an editorial – apparently) published crawl-to-referral ratios in 2025. Google crawled about 14 pages for every visitor it sent back. OpenAI, about 1,700. Anthropic, about 73,000. Full disclosure: I used Anthropic’s Claude to sort these logs. It took the data and gave nothing back either, except a table.

So the room is full. Government readers. Commercial watchers. Machines reading for other machines. Everybody’s watching me. What are we doing? We’re watching each other watch other but can’t reproduce the fucking song, and, not for nothing…

Nobody’s singing back.

Verse three: Oct. 19 to Oct. 27

This wasn’t a one-morning fling after a drunken one night stand at D’Arcy McGee’s – which makes an amazing Old Fashioned (shout out).

On October 19, the Monday after the fire, a federal reader found our gas-well satellite piece through Google and stayed 33 seconds. Two hours later, another federal address typed our URL in directly and stayed seven minutes across two satellite pieces, including the one showing fire before the explosion.

One of those addresses came back. October 26, just before 1 p.m. Ottawa time. Then twice on October 27, once at 4:34 in the morning and again just before 11, reading the same storm-line piece both times. A neighbouring address hit our exclusive satellite images at 3:48 a.m.

Three-forty-eight in the morning. Either somebody is pulling the night shift, or somebody’s morning is happening in another time zone. I don’t know which. I’m not going to pretend I do.

Here’s what we can say. Those two night-owl addresses have a public paper trail. Our own Wikipedia-edit archive, wikisscbot, has logged 564 anonymous edits from them since November 2023. We recreated the very cool Wiki scraping project that was running on Twitter until, 2023, I think – whenever Elon decided to start charging bots. Anyway, we pulled data through 2025. We just haven’t announced it yet – or maybe we just did? That’s too meta for me now.

Nearly half touch military subjects: the 30th Field Artillery Regiment, 1 Signal Regiment, the 4th Canadian Division Support Group, the Commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Army Command and Staff College. Across all Government of Canada edits in the archive, the military share is about one in seventeen.

That’s a strong lean, not a name tag. A shared exit can carry many departments. But if you were betting on who reads our satellite work at 3:48 in the morning, you wouldn’t bet on Fisheries.

What I know is this: the people who won’t answer our questions keep coming back to read the answers we found ourselves.

Outro

It’s quiet again. The dog has moved one floorboard over – Patagonian Rosewood (no I didn’t fucking pick it). The log has gone still since the PDF at 12:50.

Here’s the offer, same as always. The contact page you visited at 9:00 a.m. works. So does the email. So does Signal. Answer one question. Any of them. We’ll print it in full, word for word, the same day, with a thank-you.

You don’t have to sing. Just fill the gap.

Until then, we’ll keep the banner up and the light on.

Watching you watching me.

Coda: the request for comment

There’s one more twist, and it’s the best one.

We can’t publish this without asking the people we’re writing about. So the outlet that watches government readers watching it has now sent the government a request for comment about watching it. Shared Services Canada, which runs the network. Treasury Board, whose servers live next door to two of the addresses. National Defence, whose fire they kept reading about.

Watching them watching us watching them.

I sent these a few minutes ago while cackling like a crazy person – hypothesis not disproven.

We expect the same answer as always. We’ll print it in full either way.

Meanwhile

If you care what I’m listening to while I wait: the late Norm Macdonald. A Canadian genius. He fought cancer, and it ended in a draw. That’s a joke – his joke – look it up – it’s pretty damn good.

Here’s the moth joke. Because sometimes you have to laugh.

Also, Johnny Blue Skies & Dark Clouds, formerly Sturgill Simpson, made a disco album – in 2026. It’s pretty fucking badass. Especially given he previously made a bluegrass album, an alt-country album, a hard-rocking concept album with an anime video track, and a crooner album, and lots of other good stuff.

Questions readers ask

Was the Government of Canada reading Prime Rogue?

Yes. On Oct. 28, 2026, computers on networks run by Shared Services Canada opened 30 pages of primerogueinc.com, mostly between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Ottawa time.

Which department was it?

We can’t say – but we know. Shared Services Canada runs shared internet exits for dozens of departments, so one address can stand for many offices. Two visits came from a block whose neighbouring public servers belong to the Treasury Board Secretariat. That’s a neighbourhood, not proof. Not yet, anyway. Public servants love their fantasy hockey pools, and some pool sites log trades by IP address next to the manager’s real name. We’ll check. We won’t name any employee. We won’t even keep the names: we’ll note the department, then clear our browser history, because we follow PIPEDA too. Once the requests for comment we’ve just sent have had their answer window, we will name departments.

Is it wrong for public servants to read a news site?

No. Federal departments pay for media monitoring, and reading the news is part of many public servants’ jobs. The question this piece asks is why reading has not turned into answers. They cannot, per the Privacy Commissioner, however, look up your personal information based solely on the fulfillment of an ATIP or Privacy Act request.

What does the beaver banner do?

It adds a bilingual joke banner, signed by our dog Wilco, to pages viewed from Shared Services Canada networks. It blocks no one, identifies no individual and collects nothing beyond standard server logs.

Has DND answered Prime Rogue’s questions about the CFB Wainwright fire?

Not in writing, beyond a holding statement on Oct. 17. Every request and reply is logged on our agency-response tracker. And sources. Sources are fun. 🙂

Kevin J.S. Duska Jr. is president of Prime Rogue Inc. Reach him on Signal at Rubicon49.50. Asked to elaborate on Kevin, Prime Rogue Director of Communications Margot Lanihin said “Kevin – yes he does things – we don’t always get it. Well, he’s kind of nuts – mostly in a good way – and he really loves his dog – and those goddamn scale models that keep showing up at the office.”