Toronto Star: RCMP tracked Toronto activists with fake Facebook profile
Would liking a page or an article about blacklivesmatter on your social profile get you tracked by the RCMP, looking for other "subversive" materials? Does sharing content about social equality make you an activist? Subversive? A target of the RCMP? And what's next, under C-51... ? Article by Laurent Bastien Corbeil for the Toronto Star Has a waddle of penguins ever “liked” your Facebook page? If so, your account may have been monitored by the RCMP.
Officers with the national police force used a Facebook profile to pose as a broke student so as to communicate with protest groups in Toronto, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act.
Through the Facebook page, RCMP agents prodded organizers with seemingly innocuous questions.
“Will there be food and drinks?” an officer wrote on the Facebook page for an anti-Novotel union rally in 2012. “Cause I am on a fixed student income and will bring some buddies to add to the numbers if we can grab some free food.”
In another instance, on the event page of a pro-Ukrainian demonstration, an agent asked organizers in January, 2014, if they were planning on “walking anywhere.”
The social media account, which went by the name of Bebop Arooney and had a profile picture of three penguins frolicking on a beach, tracked the Facebook pages of more than two dozen organizations in Toronto, ranging from Black Lives Matter Toronto and Idle No More to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
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