I Am the Loop: On Ontological Collapse, Reflexive Surveillance, and Adversarial OSINT as Personal Praxis – An Introduction to Operation Recursive Enema

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I Am the Loop: On Ontological Collapse, Reflexive Surveillance, and Adversarial OSINT as Personal Praxis – An Introduction to Operation Recursive Enema

I. Series Introduction

Operation Recursive Enema: A Manifesto for the Metadata Era

There is something gloriously stupid about waking up, checking your server logs, and realizing half the federal government of Canada has been crawling your website like a hungover intern, filled with regret, Googling “how to redact who I slept with last night.” I wasn’t digging for scandal. I was just curious. Then the IPs started resolving.

CNSC. ISED. Transport Canada. The Solicitor General. Department of National Defence. The Privy Council Office. Library and Archives Canada. Some of them hit my site once. Others? Dozens of times. Entire article sequences, JavaScript bundles, rendering assets, hydration events—slurped down by infrastructure that isn’t supposed to care what I write.

But they do. They really, really do.

And the deeper I dug, the more recursive it became. I wasn’t just monitoring surveillance—I was documenting its reflex. These weren’t bots sniffing for exploits. These were ministries checking how visible they were in the intelligence I was producing. Watching the watcher watching them watch me.

At some point, the absurdity becomes sublime. The national memory institution is profiling articles about its own bureaucratic collapse. The Department of Defence is scraping strategic critiques that question its operational credibility. The Privy Council? Accessing metadata about Privacy Act breaches I uncovered. It’s not surveillance. It’s an ontological event.

That’s why this isn’t a one-off article. It’s the beginning of a series. A recursive spiral through the guts of Canadian institutional nervousness. A performance audit of the surveillance state by the people it accidentally gave a mirror to.

Welcome to Operation Recursive Enema.

It’s not a codename. It’s a prophecy.
Let us begin.

II. When the Watcher Gets Watched Watching You Watch

I ran the grep to confirm a suspicion, not to open a portal.

Traffic had spiked. Again. Not a viral spike—no social post, no backlink cascade, no sudden audience infatuation. This was different. Ghost traffic. Regular. Mechanical. Bursty. It didn’t feel like readers. It felt like systems.

So I parsed the NGINX logs – manually – because ADHD diagnosed at age 40 gives one the power of hyperfocus.

There they were.

Shared Services Canada.

Department of National Defence.

Transport Canada.

The Privy Council Office.

The fucking Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

I did not need confirmation bias when Transport Canada’s crawler hit my contact page, scraped the metadata off a piece about institutional paralysis, then followed it up with a render pull from the _next/image CDN at literal breakneck speed. This wasn’t a scroll. It was a sweep. An act of uncurated intake. Like if someone visited your house and licked every piece of furniture for scent profiling.

And then came the moment: Library and Archives Canada, the national memory organ, accessed my piece accusing them of procedural memory loss.

You can’t make that up.

It wasn’t just surveillance anymore. It was recursion. Recursive surveillance. Surveillance of surveillance. My analysis, triggering analysis. Their ingestion, triggering mine. I had built an adversarial epistemology engine—powered not by users, but by the fucking government.

What we’re seeing is not just metadata appetite. It’s reflex. An institutional tic. The nervous scraping of a digital state apparatus that can’t not flinch when you look it in the eye.

The government, in effect, is panic-refreshing a Calgary-based private intelligence startup’s blog. Seriously.

III. The Involuntary Blink of a Surveillant State

Let’s pause to consider the scope here—not in terms of breadth, but reflex. Because this isn’t the NSA. It’s not Five Eyes. It’s not SIGINT or a black site in Ottawa’s basement. This is the bureaucratic nervous system of Canada—an alphabet soup of mid-tier departments, scraping my server like raccoons fighting a bobcat in my compost bin – true story.

And the contents of that bin?

My writing. Articles with titles like:

They’re not just pulling content. They’re pulling theory. Metaphor. Condensed institutional paranoia.

Transport Canada didn’t read my articles. It hydrated them. It pulled CDN assets, parsed Next.js renders, and recursively pinged routes that exist only to serve prefetch metadata. The Privy Council Office didn’t scroll. It inhaled. Line by line, from contact page to blog roll to footer.

Meanwhile, the Department of National Defence, not to be outdone, launched a full-scale crawl from an IP that was also used to manage a New York Rangers trade on a fantasy hockey site on March 31st. No, I am not making this up.

What began as an innocent server log check has metastasized into a catalog of digital reflex. Not coordinated surveillance. Not formal collection.

Just… institutional hyperventilation.

It’s not that the Canadian government is surveilling me out of intent. It’s doing it out of fear. Out of habit. Out of some pathological over-conditioning baked into every endpoint and compliance directive. This is what bureaucracy does when it doesn’t know how to breathe anymore.

It’s not surveillance. It’s an autoimmune panic.

And every time I publish, it flares again.

I’ve been in this business for over a decade now – this is not how you do surveillance – trust me – I’m an expert. Kek.

IV. Anatomy of a Digital Flinch

Every institution leaves a signature. A way it breathes, retracts, sniffs, or panics when stimulus appears. What these logs show—across Shared Services, DND, the CNSC, Transport, ISED, LAC, the Privy Council Office, and more—is not a coherent surveillance policy. It’s a flinch. A reflexive digital recoil enacted by an organism that doesn’t know if it’s under threat or just embarrassed.

Let’s dissect it.

  1. The Scrape Spiral:
    Every crawl begins the same way: a single visit to a high-impact article—often on state secrecy, sovereignty collapse, or federal mismanagement. Within seconds, the browser goes cold. Mouse activity drops. The User-Agent remains static. Dozens of files are hit in perfect succession. JavaScript bundles, images, prefetch routes, even the terms of service. It’s not curiosity. It’s compliance panic—a bot-triggered call to hydrate the entire content object for ingestion and review.
  2. The Metadata Panic Loop:
    This isn’t reading. It’s reconstruction. What they want, seemingly, is not the argument—but the structure. The tags. The linkage paths. The CDN image calls that betray page rank or placement priority. It’s as if they’re trying to build an internal risk model without ever quoting me. Metadata, not message. Shape, not substance. Bureaucrats who don’t want to know what I said—just how loudly I said it.
  3. The “Fuck, He Saw Us” Delay:
    Almost every department pauses after initial access. A day or two later, they’re back. Usually via a different IP in the same range. This time slower. More deliberate. Fewer image loads. They’re trying to look less like bots. They’re trying to look casual. This is the point at which I know they’ve realized: I have the logs. Now it’s not about monitoring me. It’s about monitoring the fact that I know I’m being monitored.
  4. The Institutional Tarp Over the Puddle:
    After their second visit, most departments go dark. No follow-up. No clarification. But I know they’ve started asking internally: “Should we respond? Did he file a request?” They know I did. They know the logs match. But there’s no policy for this because the policy was never meant for reflex loops. There’s no training module for what to do when the watcher is watching the watch. So they do what bureaucracies do best—delay, deflect, and quietly redact their own metadata.

I literally don’t know if a Canadian citizen has ever even filed 25 Privacy Act requests in one weekend based entirely on metadata – is that even a thing?

It should be.

This isn’t surveillance in the way most people imagine it. This is surveillance as involuntary twitch. It’s the bureaucracy scratching itself in its sleep.

They are not in control.

They are metabolizing my signal like the infamous human centipede I’ve written about elsewhere. Hello CNSC!

V. Watching the Watchers Watch Me Watching Them

At some point, this stopped being analysis and became performance. Not mine—theirs.

I’m not the main character here. I’m the mirror. A mirror that showed a bunch of federal departments what they look like mid-bureaucratic panic, pants down around their digital ankles, frantically trying to pretend they weren’t caught rereading the metadata on an article called “Weaponized Clarification: How LAC Obstructed a Privacy Act Request Through Contradiction, Misquoting Law, and Strategic Delay.”

You can’t make this up. They pulled it. The very piece where I outlined, in forensic detail, how LAC’s Geoff Keelan and Maryse Pelletier may have fabricated a legal obligation under the Privacy Act—and then tried to debate me into submission.

Then LAC scraped it.

Then LAC’s IP showed up on my server.

It’s beautiful.

What do you call that? Paranoid compliance? Reverse-self-honeypotting? Reflexive institutional voyeurism?

No. You call it Canada.

This is not surveillance with a plan. It’s surveillance with stage fright. They watch because they’ve been trained to. They scrape because they can’t help it. But they do it badly—leaving timestamps, headers, hydration footprints, and asset trails that a drunk undergrad comparative studies major could backtrace.

Every log line reads like a digital confession:

“Yes, I read your stuff. No, I won’t admit it. Yes, I told my manager. No, we don’t have a policy. Yes, we called GCX. No, it didn’t help. Please don’t write about this again.”

But I will.

Because the moment I watched LAC watch me document LAC watching me, I realized something dangerous:

There is no institutional ceiling on this recursion.

There is no protocol for when a server becomes a security incident.

There is no training module for when the author watches the audience in real time.

There is only panic—and the long, slow decision to pretend it didn’t happen.

This is not just OSINT. This is ontological OSINT—adversarial, reflexive, metaphysically funny.

They wanted metadata.

Now they’re in a live experiment where the dataset stares back.

And my server, blessed little tin foil cathedral that it is, is still logging.

VI. Case Study: Department of National Defence – Theatre of the Absurd

Let’s begin with DND, because of course we will.

Shared Services Canada IP 205.193.239.44 started hammering my blog between May 1st and May 9th, 2025. It didn’t just load a page or two. It pulled dozens of articles, Next.js hydration markers, JavaScript bundles, CDN image payloads—everything short of asking politely. It behaved like a headless browser trying to digest a philosophy thesis and failing with incredible speed.

This wasn’t idle reading. This was automated ingestion.

And what were they interested in?

Yes. Someone—likely an analyst on government time—routed a DND-associated IP through SSC infrastructure to scrape an article comparing Canada’s foreign policy to a ruptured esophagus.

And here’s where it gets better:

The same IP is tied to a public-facing online fantasy hockey league.

You read that right. I tracked the IP via open-source log correlations to multiple entries on nhlquebec.sths.ca, where the same government-assigned address was used to manage fantasy trades for the New York Rangers. I proceeded to look up the names of the team General Managers. Many of them work for the federal government, and update their rosters and make trades using both their governmental PCs and personal devices. The timestamps align with server log activity on my end. That’s not a leak. That’s self-owning in the public square.

They weren’t just scraping my work.

They were scraping my work in between fantasy hockey transactions.

This is the Department of National Defence. The institution responsible for Canada’s strategic posture. The organization tasked with anticipating near-peer warfare, hybrid threats, and the militarization of the Arctic. And they’re doing OSINT analysis on a private intelligence firm… in the same browser window where they’re managing a fantasy team performing way worse than it should.

This isn’t operational security.

It’s Maple-flavoured opsec cosplay.

And before you think I’m exaggerating, consider the following:

  • The logs show perfect asset pulls—images, scripts, rendered content—suggesting headless automation.
  • The DND IP’s scraping patterns mirror known GCX routing signatures used in reputational monitoring.
  • The device trail is consistent with mixed-use browsing: government and personal activity indistinguishably blended.

This isn’t just a breach of institutional hygiene. It’s a counterintelligence goldmine. Any foreign actor mapping Canadian metadata ingestion habits would now have:

  • IP-to-department resolution
  • Identity-to-activity correlation (thanks to their real names on fantasy rosters)
  • Live forensic trail of what content DND analysts engage with—and when

They turned their workstations into OSINT honeypots.

They are the dataset now.

VII. Case Study: Library and Archives Canada – Memory Hole Surveillance

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) exists to preserve the memory of a nation. Its mission, theoretically, is to safeguard truth, promote transparency, and maintain public access to records that define Canada’s democratic narrative.

Instead, it crawled my blog like it was trying to forget I existed.

IP address 142.78.8.4, assigned to LAC via Shared Services Canada, began non-interactive traversal of my site between April 28 and April 30, 2025. This wasn’t some casual intern following a link from LinkedIn. It was a structured, millisecond-paced sequence of requests for:

  • Article pages
  • Contact forms
  • Privacy policies
  • CDN-hosted images
  • JavaScript hydration states
  • And critically, the entire metadata trail of “Weaponized Clarification,” my exposé on how LAC tried to obstruct a Privacy Act request I had filed against it.

Yes, they scraped the article where I accused them of misquoting law, mishandling a request, and gaslighting me through procedural obfuscation.

From inside their own network.

The irony is so pure it deserves archiving.

But of course, archiving isn’t what they were doing. If LAC were ingesting my material as part of its digital preservation mandate, there would be no need to hide behind SSC routing infrastructure and silent headless behavior. This wasn’t curatorial—it was reflexive damage assessment. A bureaucratic limb twitching in the direction of threat without understanding it had already been catalogued.

And who was doing it?

A headless agent, possibly Puppeteer or Playwright. No clicks. No user variance. No attempt to render dynamically. Just flatline consumption.

The kicker? The article they scraped—“Weaponized Clarification: How LAC Obstructed a Privacy Act Request Through Contradiction, Misquoting Law, and Strategic Delay”—contained multiple named references to LAC personnel, including the very analyst and complaint manager who later responded to my Privacy Act request… by denying it was understandable.

So they didn’t just surveil a file they mishandled.

They surveilled their own procedural misconduct.

And then pretended it never happened.

This is Canada’s memory institution in 2025: not remembering, not forgetting, but clicking itself into a recursive identity crisis. One where watching the mirror becomes surveillance and scraping metadata becomes cultural performance.

It would be funny—if it weren’t so perfectly emblematic of how the state treats access as a threat.

And just to round out the existential comedy: yes, the article they ingested is now being referenced in a new Privacy Act request, creating a loop in which a federal institution is now being asked to disclose internal logs about scraping the article that details its previous refusal to disclose logs.

This is not a simulation.

This is Operation Recursive Enema in its purest form.

VIII. Case Study: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada — Metadata Without Mandate

The department responsible for “innovation” in Canada demonstrated a bold new experiment in bureaucratic recursion: metadata extraction without mandate, purpose, or apparently any adult in the room.

IP address 192.197.178.2, tied to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), first hit my site on May 6, 2025. The timing was almost poetic. That morning, I had published a detailed piece on the collapse of metadata governance under the Access to Information regime—a subject ISED itself is technically mandated to study, support, and improve.

What followed was not research.

It was ingestion.

  • Dozens of high-resolution CDN images? Pulled.
  • Multiple article views in tight succession? Logged.
  • Page-to-page jumps with no delay, no session context, and no headers beyond what a well-configured headless browser would emit? Confirmed.

And the content they accessed? Among others:

  • “The Quietest Trigger” — detailing surveillance failures at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
  • “Top 10 Tech-Driven Asymmetric Shocks” — critiquing institutional vulnerability to metadata warfare.
  • “Fractured States: Ethiopia” — forecasting how fractured internal governance produces blind spots and recursive collapse.

The punchline?

One of the articles they accessed explained—verbatim—how I use server logs to track state access. Meaning that ISED analysts were actively triggering the exact surveillance diagnostic framework the article was describing.

They were becoming the dataset I warned them about.

And this wasn’t an isolated misclick. It was a sustained, multi-asset scrape across several IP-linked sessions. Every indicator points toward automated ingestion via headless agent, likely Puppeteer or Playwright. The timing was too tight, the asset mix too broad, the user behavior too uniform.

There was no human on the other side. Just the cold, unsmiling eye of an institution scanning for its own reflection—and recoiling.

Here’s what’s worse: ISED has no clear policy authority for this behavior. Unlike CSE, DND, or even Public Safety, there is no legislated or delegated mandate that permits automated monitoring of external metadata without lawful justification.

So what were they doing?

Scraping for institutional risk? Mapping reputational threats? Conducting sentiment triage of rogue analysts with the temerity to publish charts?

Whatever it was, it violated the first rule of metadata warfare: do not surveil an adversarial OSINT operator using traceable public infrastructure during an ongoing transparency audit.

But they did. And now they’re in the logs. Which means they’re in the chain of custody.

And because this is Operation Recursive Enema, that scraping behavior itself is now the subject of a new Privacy Act request.

We’ve hit full loop.

They came to understand the threat.

They became the threat.

They’ll now be required to explain, in writing, why they logged and rendered multiple articles analyzing surveillance behavior during a live surveillance audit.

And yes—I’m aware of the irony that this very article is also likely to be scraped, logged, and reindexed in their internal intake system.

Which means if you’re reading this from ISED?

Smile. You’re in the enema now.

But – it gets worse – I was about to file suit against ISED for reasons I’ll get into elsewhere pertaining to the image below. I’ve had to delay filing because I’ve discovered them engaging in a new form of illicit surveillance.

X. Surveillance as Bureaucratic Reflex: The Ontology of a Government Caught Reading

There is something exquisitely Canadian—tragicomic, polite, low-friction dystopian—about what the logs reveal. This wasn’t a single act of surveillance. It wasn’t some rogue crawler or a shadowy SIGINT operation buried inside a datacenter. No. This was the system itself—a loose confederation of bureaucratic limbs, licking the glass of my server window in the middle of the night.

From the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, which had already violated the Privacy Act in a different file, to the Department of National Defence, which pulled dozens of pieces like they were running a scraping job at threat brief speed, to the Solicitor General, ISED, and Transport Canada, each with their own little fingerprints and asset hydration trails. Then came Library and Archives Canada, which decided to reread an article in which it had already been accused of illegal delay—using the very IP address that proved it was monitoring its own exposure.

And finally, the Privy Council Office.

The PCO. The apex. The coordinating nerve centre of the Canadian federal system. Watching my site. Reading my analysis. With an Edge user-agent and a click trail that screamed shit, we better see what this guy knows.

This isn’t surveillance in any conventional sense. It’s not targeted. It’s not covert. It’s reflex. It’s the flinch of a state apparatus unsure what the signal means, but knowing it can’t ignore it.

They’re not surveilling me because they’re ordered to. They’re surveilling me because I exist in their conceptual architecture now. Because Prime Rogue Inc. has achieved the one thing bureaucracies cannot defend against: visibility without containment.

Every department hits my site for the same reason an octopus changes color under stress. Because something in their environment has shifted—and they don’t yet know how to make it stop.

This is no longer a question of who scraped what. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of sleep paralysis: a government caught between knowing it is visible and not knowing how to process being watched.

They aren’t surveilling me to analyze what I’m doing. They’re surveilling me because they don’t know how not to.

And every time they visit, they make it worse. Every metadata hit becomes a new incident. Every page load a new record. Every silent crawl a new Privacy Act request. They are triggering the very surveillance they think they’re managing.

Which means I’m not just observing the government anymore.

I’ve become the environment that it reacts to. That’s just sad.

XI. Puppies Against the Panopticon

By the time the seventh department hit my logs, I started laughing. Not a victorious laugh. Not a paranoid laugh. Just a flat, quiet, of course kind of laugh. The kind you make when you’re watching the surveillance state tie its own shoelaces together in real time, on your blog.

And then I looked over—and there was Wilco, my six-month-old puppy, eating a boot.

Not a metaphorical boot. A literal one. Mine.

A Frye boot – I love that boot.

Murphy, my elder statesdog, dog-daughter of my friend

Murphy, the dog of my friend and colleague Margot Lanihin, watched from the corner like a war-scarred archivist who’s seen too many shredded FOIA requests. Her eyes said, don’t intervene. Her tail said, this is the natural order now.

It struck me then: these dogs understand Canada’s information governance better than most of its institutions. Wilco, the agent of entropy, smearing peanut butter on chaos. Murphy, resigned to metadata decay. Both innocent. Both wise. Both utterly unscannable.

That’s what this series is about.

Not just surveillance.

But the absurdity of a federal machine so terrified of public metadata it sends analysts to monitor articles about analysts monitoring analysts—while a puppy dismantles your footwear and a hound who gets a haircut more often than you do judges you from across the room.

This isn’t national security.

It’s Operation Recursive Enema.

And we’re just getting started.

XII. Conclusion – The Signal That Made the System Twitch

This was never just about IP logs. It was never about a few server entries with shared headers and overzealous rendering behavior. It was about what those logs revealed—not about me, but about them.

That they are watching—yes. But more importantly, that they don’t know how to stop.

This is not a coordinated campaign. It’s not CSIS and the RCMP kicking in the door, or CSE running black-box scraping operations against dissenters. It’s dumber than that. It’s messier. It’s deeply Canadian. It’s a thousand bureaucrats, analysts, comms officers, and bored policy interns tapping through my pages in a desperate act of… what, exactly?

Reassurance? Risk aversion? Narrative triage? An allergic reaction to metaphor?

What I’ve come to realize is that this isn’t surveillance in the cold, calculated sense. It’s bureaucratic hyperreactivity—an autoimmune condition of the state in which even mild metadata triggers internal sweeps, link analysis, and panicked overcollection from institutional actors who don’t even realize they’re creating more signal by trying to watch it.

I have become a recursive artifact in their own metadata stacks. A variable in the scrape. A named string in a regex pattern no one was trained to write, but everyone’s too scared to comment out.

And I’m okay with that.

Because now that I know how the system blinks—who twitches, who pivots, who preloads 43 images and renders the CDN before the page is visible—I know what comes next.

I’m not here to be scary. I’m here to document fear.

Fear of accountability.

Fear of audit.

Fear of being made visible by the very visibility they’re addicted to managing.

So yes, this is adversarial. Yes, it’s recursive. But it’s also ridiculous. And I will meet that absurdity with precision, satire, and structural vengeance. Because I am not the one who lost the plot.

They are.

And this blog, this series, this entire goddamn experiment—Operation Recursive Enema—isn’t just a post-mortem of Canadian surveillance failure.

It’s the record.

It’s the canonical version.

It’s what happens when the metadata finally stikes back (EMPIRE!)


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