Big Brother’s shadow: Decline in reported use of electronic surveillance by Canadian Federal Law Enforcement
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite popular perception of increased government surveillance, particularly since 9/11, a longitudinal study of the Annual Reports on the Use of Electronic Surveillance, published by Public Safety Canada between 1973 and 2011, demonstrates the opposite trend. This article first outlines this decline to situate the use of electronic surveillance by federal law enforcement. The second section of the article advances legal, political, and practical influences which are likely contributing to the diminished use of wiretapping by police. The purpose of this article is to present quantitative evidence to better inform the ongoing debate around extending “lawful access” regimes in Canada. By using official government statistics as a foundation, this article provides a practical grounding to the theoretical academic and legal research that often informs law, legislation and public policy governing the use of surveillance technology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it