“In the Field of Espionage, There's No Such Thing as Peacetime”: The Official Secrets Act and the <scp>picnic</scp> Wiretapping Program
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
In 1951, the Canadian government created Privy Council Order 3486 (pc 3486) in order to engage in a covert phone-tapping program against individuals, organizations, and foreign governments (embassies) on Canadian soil. The program was codenamed “picnic” and was run by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp), Canada's then security service, specifically out of the Special Branch. In consultation with the rcmp, the government decided to continue the phone tapping indefinitely, with the rcmp writing warrants instead of a judge. After 1953 covert wiretapping continued through Section 11 of Canada's Official Secrets Act. I argue that security can be understood and interpreted as an ideological construct. What did security mean in this period to the government and its intelligence services? Security was knowledge, in terms of safeguarding and hiding it and secretly collecting it. The article reveals the construction of state apparatus separated from the country's legislative branch and changes our understanding of surveillance in the Cold War. In terms of wiretapping, the rcmp was not “going rogue” in its targeting of individuals in the Cold War, they were following orders.
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 | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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