Feds Spied on First Nations Children's Advocate

Aboriginal Affairs had staffers keep tabs on nearly every speech given or event attended by Cindy Blackstock for the past four years.

Cindy Blackstock is the head of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and a well known First Nations advocate. She's also been the subject of government monitoring for the past four years due to a human rights complaint she filed against Ottawa for not providing enough funding to aboriginal children's services across the country. Blackstock told APTN that an access-to-information request she made to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (it's now called the Department of Aboriginal Affairs) led to her receiving a giant binder's worth of emails, memos, and more detailing everything the department had amassed on her. It revealed that the department had routinely sent staffers out to her events and speeches to report on just about everything she had been saying (which was usually "aboriginal kids are underfunded"), and even made one bureaucrat use his personal Facebook account after work hours to take snapshots of Blackstock's Facebook page which were later entered into government logs. The department says that it routinely monitors social networking sites as they "[relate] to the department’s policies programs, services and initiatives." Good to know Big Brother's using his resources to counter the obvious threat to national security that is a middle-aged woman who's devoted her life to helping the country's most disadvantaged children.