MCFD Surveillance: Paranoid or Real?

Welcome to MCFD’s amateur world of espionage. Like many MCFD tactics used against parents, it is hard to believe that some of those scrutinized by MCFD could be under a 24-hour government surveillance in 21st century Canada. If you have no prior experience with MCFD, you may find this unbelievable. Even some parents who have received "service" from MCFD but have not been put under surveillance find this absurd.

We are not suggesting that MCFD send their agents to spy on the general public. Section 14 of the Child, Family and Community Service Act (CFCSA) obliges everyone to report to MCFD if there is reason to believe that a child needs protection. This creates a network of informants sufficient to keep the "child protection" industry in business. We will further elaborate this in the section "MCFD Information Systems" below.

Furthermore, MCFD does not launch surveillance in every case. They only do so when there is useful information to gain. Do heed our advice that MCFD does send their secret agents to conduct surveillance on you and your family, especially when you are under a supervision order with a restrictive contact term or when MCFD has a weak case. This is happening daily in the “best place on earth to live.”

Although in an American context, the news video footage titled "CPS Wrongful Removal of Baby" on the top left hand corner of this page contains an "accidental discovery" of a breach of supervision order, namely, the parents were found alone with the baby when a social worker went to their residence to check out an allegation. What allegation and who made it? Without surveillance, how could this possibly happen? By chance or mere luck? The greatest success of a deception is to make believe that the enemy or a threat does not exist. If you are still not convinced "child protection" agency does mount surveillance on parents under scrutiny, read on and watch the video below.

Whenever there is a public forum discussing problems created by state-sponsored child removal, special interests from the "child protection" industry often maintain a presence to defend the merit of such oppressive regime. For instance, when challenged by an anonymous blogger on the issue of surveillance in the blog created by Mr. Ron Unruh (an advocate for the return of the children of Paul and Zabeth Bayne of Surrey, British Columbia, Canada), a case worker (or community worker) from MCFD's Fraser Region using the pseudonym CW vigorously denied the infamous practice. One of our members brought to our attention that CW remarked specifically that information in this page is totally inaccurate.

We would like to use CW's responses in the aforesaid blog to illustrate how skillful defenders of the industry are in covering up their controversial activities by using reasons that appear seemingly valid and plausible.

This photo, taken in June 2008, is one of MCFD's offices in Victoria. The label on the front door bears the provincial slogan "British Columbia The Best Place on Earth". British Columbia is a blessed land with fine people, bountiful natural resources and beautiful scenery. However, the "child protection" activities tarnish the highest quality of the province. We are far from being the best place of Earth. It is noteworthy to mention that most MCFD offices are highly secured. Public access is severely restricted. If the Ministry is truly protecting children, helping and developing families in need, the security risk should be low as parents and children would love to receive its services. The exceptionally high security measures of MCFD offices reflect the Ministry's popularity among the people it serves.	On June 7, 2010 1:58 PM, CW wrote: MCFD does not have the resources to employ such surveillance tactics as suggested. Please provide evidence to support your claims. pa-pa.ca re: surveillance is totally inaccurate. Please provide a different source. "After Hours support services"? Would this not be the province-wide Children's Helpline? Which responds to requests from concerned citizens, professionals, and SW's alike to contact families in evening or weekends. They do not "monitor". If you could provide some sort of policy or MCFD-directive - maybe a budget report re: surveillance that'd be appreciated. I will point out - teachers are not MCFD watchdogs. They are given the same Handbook for Child Abuse as can anyone else receive or read. In fact, the Vancouver Sun today speaks about how poorly the schools have done in regards to reporting to RCMP or MCFD in the lower mainland of BC. On the same day, CW wrote again at 10:52 PM to further strengthen his/her arguments: CPS services the world over, as are all government funded programs, adept at ill-spending/mismanaging money. Show a copy of the job advertisement - burden of proof lay with the accuser. Ray Ferris - documented former SW has already stated clearly on this web page that MCFD does not use "spies." All MCFD front line SW's are called "investigators" to one degree or another. This does not equal "sitting plain clothed in a car" (not sure what the SW uniform is other than plain clothed?) or "hacking into emails." Ray was also quite right in saying MCFD SW are not competent or adept enough at such surveillance without bungling it up anyway!
On June 16, 2010 9:01 AM, CW wrote: Anon 12:27 - I think its with you where the burden of proof lays, does it not? Someone else had already mentioned PAPA on this web site before I had. I don't mind if people go to PAPA, they post a lot of important videos and articles. I referred solely to the surveillance section. I should note, I only am aware of SW conduct in the Fraser Region - certainly re: surveillance. Showing video of SW's in other provinces, or countries is nothing I can speak to. I guess I can only assume "surveillance" practice is the same in all BC regions as it is in Fraser. ...... When Mr. Unruh published the rebuttal from the anonymous blogger on August 4, 2010 raising the issue of surveillance, CW wrote at 6:14 PM, : Ron, I must say I am surprised & disappointed with you. You have just done, exactly what yourself and others who comment on this blog state is the cause for their disdain/distrust of MCFD. You have condemned a person based on completely unfounded accusations by an anonymous accuser. I will no longer be "contributing" to the conversations held on this blog, as a result.
We affirm that MCFD does mount surveillance in some, but not all, cases. There are only two possibilities to explain CW's responses. If CW honestly does not know that MCFD conducts surveillance on some parents, MCFD treats such intrusive activity as top secret that CW's pay grade does not have the clearance to learn. If CW does know that MCFD conducts surveillance, then he/she is on a damage control mission to vigorously deny the truth and mislead the public.
Why Denying Surveillance? To avoid alerting the targets (hence maintaining the element of surprise), the public, the media and the court that they are conducting such intrusive activity, "child protection" agencies around the globe make extra effort to discredit or to downplay the notion of surveillance, characterizing it as paranoid or delusional disorder, hence further undermining the credibility of those who claim that there is surveillance. Secrecy, fear, public ignorance and blind faith on government are their keys to success. Incriminatory information obtained from surveillance is often portrayed as from:
anonymous informants; an unspecified neighbor, foster parent, day care worker or school teacher; accidental/incidental discoveries when "child protection" social workers or their accomplice conveniently show up in the target's residence. This approach carries the added benefit of reducing the chance of privacy lawsuit. Spying, especially spying in one's home without a court order, is a significant privacy violation. The school authority of Lower Merion School District in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has agreed to pay out $610,000 after admitting it spied on pupils in their homes through the cameras on their laptop computers. Information obtained from illegal surveillance amounts to unreasonable search, a violation of Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It will be interesting to see oppressed parents suing MCFD of such violation in a country that ardently speaks of human rights and civil liberty. School authority settled privacy lawsuit with tax dollars and may face criminal charges from the FBI ...
We emphasize that information in our web site is not fictional. Information therein is derived from the real experience of oppressed parents. The purpose of adding this page in our web site is to raise public knowledge on what oppressed parents will face and to give early warning to parents to minimize the damage of MCFD’s activities on their families and children.

What is Surveillance?

Surveillance is the monitoring of activities of an object. It is an old scheme used extensively in different areas since the beginning of civilization. Sun Tze covered the use of spies in the last chapter of his famous treatise “The Art of War”. The main objective is to obtain vital information via covert operations to make decisions in defeating an enemy. Government has the most powerful surveillance systems, because they are enabled under the law. Of course, government sometimes conducts illegal surveillance. Most victims of such activities are either unaware of the illegality or do not have the resources to fight government in court.

MCFD mounted surveillance is either covert (without the knowledge of the target) or overt (easily observable activities for the purpose of delivering the message "we are watching over you") in nature. Generally speaking, some oppressed parents under MCFD surveillance are spouses still on good terms and are working together to protect their children from being removed or trying to get them back. Of course, MCFD conducts surveillance on estranged spouse as well. Typically, usual MCFD tactic is to separate parents using supervision order, put them under heavy surveillance hoping to catch a breach of unauthorized contact to justify further actions. Be mindful that no provision in CFCSA explicitly allows such act. This is made possible by way of a court sanctioned supervision order and a huge MCFD budget that attracts the attention of some special interest groups.

Many parents are soft targets. They are not involved in clandestine activity and have no reason to suspect surveillance being launched by their own government. They have no training in countermeasure and lacks the financial resources to buy counter surveillance equipment. Unlike players in the espionage community, most MCFD surveillance members are amateurs. Many of them are excessive government personnel creating a job for themselves under the pretext of "child protection". They are not difficult to detect if parents are vigilant.

Materials in this topic are discussed under the following headings (please click headings to view the contents).

These two responses, received only one day apart, represent two very opposite views on the information discussed herein. The response received from Mr. X on December 14, 2009 mocked us for presenting laughable and false information. It is noteworthy to remark that this after-hour browser from Chilliwack (British Columbia) sent his response at 2:47 a.m. when most people are sleeping. Furthermore, he remarked that:

1. information contained in our "Empirical Data & Stats" page is completely false, including statistics published by various levels of government;
2. "People who hear about child abuse, report that abuse because they do not wish to confront the parent directly about it."

   He was referring to Section 14 of Child, Family and Community Service Act (CFCSA) which requires everyone to report to authority if he or she has a reason to believe that a child needs protection. No where in our older version "MCFD Surveillance" page at that time mentions anything on the merit of mandatory reporting of children believed to be in need of protection. To prove our point, we linked this older version herein as a reference.

Inspired by Mr. X's mock, unsubstantiated criticism and his allegation that we disagreed with the merit of Section 14, we added a new section called "MCFD Information Systems" to complete MCFD's surveillance activities.

The second response received on December 15, 2009 is from a mother who had been scrutinized by MCFD. She provided a first hand testimony of her experience. If this is a contest of believability, which testimony will you will pick?

Remarks

Despite that MCFD surveillance agents are not professional and often sloppy, they are effective to the extent of providing what “child protection” social workers need. Information obtained from surveillance is often accepted as "evidence" without questioning:

• the motive of the informant;
• the authenticity, completeness and accuracy of the "evidence"; and above all,
• the legality of how the information was obtained in "child protection" hearings.

Recent statistics released by MCFD confirm that expenses incurred in this so-called “after hour support service” constituents over 44% of total child removal costs since 2003. This suggests that “child protection” social workers use surveillance extensively. Like other child removal activities, surveillance is another job creation scheme designed to benefit special interest groups under the pretext of “child protection”.

Popular Culture and References

Furthermore, the following books and web site are good reference to those who are interested in the surveillance business:

• “Secrets of Surveillance: A Professional's Guide to Tailing Subjects by Vehicle, Foot, Airplane and Public Transportation” published by Paladin Press (1993) ISBN 139780873647229
• “Surveillance Countermeasures: A Serious Guide to Detecting, Evading, and Eluding Threats to Personal Privacy” published by Paladin Press (2005) ISBN 0873647637
• "How to Conduct a Surveillance" from howtoinvestigate.com

[This page was added on July 30, 2008, last revised on December 8, 2010.]