Two cases of IP tracking in Canadian media

Comparing Canadaland’s recent actions with the Ottawa Citizen’s 2012 case

What Canadaland did this week—apparently attempting to identify anonymous Reddit users by capturing their IP addresses—echoes an Ottawa Citizen investigation from more than a decade ago.

Both attempts sought to identify who was behind online accounts, but they differed in how they were carried out. And even though these operations are decades apart, they still raise ethical and legal questions for journalists.

Canadaland Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and host Jesse Brown

Bill C-30 and a minister’s divorce papers

In 2012, Bill C-30 sparked national controversy. It would have allowed police to access Canadians’ private internet data without a warrant.

The government said it was needed to fight crime, especially child exploitation. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (in)famously told critics they could “stand with the government” or “with child pornographers.”

People weren’t particularly concerned about breaching a criminal’s privacy, but about their own.

In 2012, online privacy was relatively new, allowing anyone to share hot takes, sexual fetishes, or mental health concerns publicly, yet anonymously, and not worry about their day jobs.

What would it mean to have police mucking around in all that, without a warrant, or even a heads up?

Critics called it the “online snooping bill.”

As privacy lawyer David Fraser explained at the time: “Not only will the police, national security folks and the competition cops be able to get customer names, addresses, IP addresses and e-mail addresses without a warrant, there’s a gag order that means you’ll likely never find out you’ve been the subject of such an inquiry even if you ask your ISP.”

The public backlash against C-30 was immediate.

Two campaigns rolled out on Twitter.

One response was the #TellVicEverything campaign, started by Prince Edward Island resident Robert Jensen in February 2012. (He identified himself to the media.)

People flooded Vic Toews’ Twitter account with absurd disclosures and mock confessions: what they ate for lunch, that they lied to their boss, that their milk was two days past its expiration date, but, dammit all to hell, they were going to drink it anyway.

The idea was: if the government wanted to know everything about you, why not just proactively overshare?

#TellVicEverything trended for days—it was a work-distracting, time-wasting, fun protest. And annoying and embarrassing for Toews. But he took it in stride.

Then came another Twitter protest: @Vikileaks30, an anonymous account that began posting details from Toews’ messy divorce. The records were public, but not online—someone went to court to get the hard copy, then curated the information in Tweets for maximum embarrassment.

Supporters of @Vikileaks30 argued that a politician who advanced legislation eroding their privacy had this coming.

Critics said that even if the documents were technically public, @Vikileaks30 was tastelessly shifting the debate from policy to a personal attack and pulling innocent family members into the spotlight.

For people in public life, @Vikileaks30 changed the rules.

No legacy media would ever publish divorce records to critique legislation, but on new platforms, anyone could publish, retweet, like, and share information based on their personal values and whims.

We’re used to that now, but it was new then. And context matters for what happened when the Ottawa Citizen decided to snare the person behind @Vikileaks30 on Feb. 16, 2012.

The Ottawa Citizen’s @Vikileaks30 Sting

The Ottawa Citizen sent a link to the @Vikileaks30 account holder in a private email.

The link led to an unlisted webpage. About 15 minutes after the email was sent, someone clicked it.

The IP address traced back to the House of Commons.

An important detail is that the House of Commons (like most government and many corporate entities) uses a static IP address—a fixed internet address that doesn’t change.

Most people have dynamic IPs that do change. They give only a rough location and a server like “bell.ca” or “comcast.net”.

The static IP pointed to a Government of Canada domain.

Tracing the IP address online allowed the Ottawa Citizen to connect the activity to a person.

From there, the paper conducted further checks and reported its findings.

But they did not name the individual they believed was running the account.

The Speaker of the House opened an investigation, but ultimately the person unmasked themselves. Liberal staffer Adam Carroll confessed.

The Citizen didn’t get universal applause for this unmasking.

Remember, the whole Twitter protest began about Bill C-30, a bill that threatened online privacy.

Canadians were already arguing about anonymity and surveillance, and here was a newsroom using tracking techniques to unmask a Twitter account.

What were the ethics of unmasking @Vikileaks30?

The investigation sparked public debate.

Many were as uncomfortable with a newspaper unmasking them as they were with the police doing so.

The investigation had also been carried out surreptitiously, using deception and a phishing-style tactic.

Is my account next, people wondered?

The Citizen staff realized their investigation had come at a cost—raising public skepticism, undermining public trust, and drawing scrutiny to their methods.

They responded in an editorial titled "The Public and the Personal," published Feb. 18, 2012.

They argued that undercover journalism has always existed; the question was whether or not the investigation was ethical.

So, when is it ethical for a journalist to hide their identity to get information?

According to the Ottawa Citizen, there were three principles:

The first principle: the information cannot be obtained any other way.

The second: the investigation serves the public interest. They argued that the account was influencing public policy.

As they put it, “whether you’re a fan of Vikileaks or not, it’s undeniable that the Twitter account significantly changed the discussion about Toews, about the proposed legislation and about politics in Canada generally.”

When they discovered the source was a government IP address, they said the public interest increased because it suggested possible wrongdoing. Not a crime, per se, but a possible breach of professional ethics.

The third principle: transparency. The methods of the investigation were disclosed publicly and open to scrutiny.

The editorial also pointed out what the Citizen did not do. They did not name the individual, even though they could connect the activity to a person.

They only published that the account belonged to a House of Commons IP, leaving it to the system to let the cards fall where they may.

After all, @Vikileaks30 may not have reflected everyone’s ethics, but what it had done was not illegal. If there was a breach of professional responsibility, that was up to the Speaker and the House to investigate and make public in due time.

Full Disclosure: The Canadaland Reddit story, and me

I occasionally—rarely—post on Reddit under Pabàmàdiz (an Indigenous name meaning to wander without purpose). The name is unique to me and also used on my Bluesky account, so it is not anonymous.

Mostly, I promoted and fan-girled the Hatchet (though I did make a critical post about Canadaland a few weeks ago, which was, admittedly, unnecessary). Nothing has been deleted—search and read if you like. I mention this for transparency.

I was caught up in this week’s Canadaland-related events, along with others.

I received four links through Bluesky, then a ProtonMail account, both called “CL Tipster,” and I clicked all of them, as did a dozen or more people who received the links on various social media platforms.

The links led to a two-year-old internal draft of a journalistic policy, with my name on it, that had been posted multiple times. (It is archived here, on Wayback Machine)

The draft was written by three union members and me in 2024, and shared on Canadaland’s Google Drive. This version appears to have been reformatted for posting, with Jesse Brown’s Google Docs comments pasted in and italicized, but the wording itself does not appear to have changed.

It is an innocuous document.

My first thought was that the links had been sent to me by an employee inside Canadaland.

The union is currently in negotiations. In their first agreement, ratified in January 2022, staff asked for the “establishment of a joint committee to draft an editorial standards document that will provide guidance for Canadaland’s editorial work.”

Canada had a patchwork of policies, but no in-depth journalistic policy like NPR’s, CBC’s, the Narwhal’s, or the National Observer's, for that matter. The staff wanted one.

This had not been done when I arrived in July 2023, so I committed to it. A committee of three union members and I spent a year of Fridays poring over JSPs and assembling a document suited to Canadaland.

So the page, now public, is from that draft JSP.

When I received the links, I thought that the Canadaland Union was giving me a quiet heads-up that the document was about to be made public, possibly as part of a negotiation tactic.

Of course, that guess now seems to be entirely wrong.

It quickly became public knowledge that several people had received the same links by email and DMs.

I immediately thought of the Ottawa Citizen investigation I just described and wondered whether this was an attempt to capture IP addresses.

Shortly after, a friend pointed out a visible IP tracker on the pages.

While we were discovering this, it came to our attention that author Mark Bourrie had posted on Substack about a late-night call from Jesse, who accused him of running sock-puppet accounts on Reddit.

Simultaneously, Reddit was blowing up.

Most of what I know is from Bourrie - corroborated by reporting and posts from Press Progress’ Luke LeBrun and citizen journalist Edward Rowe. I know a bit more from Reddit Posts and a confession from a Reddit moderator.

It looks like this was an attempt to grab IPs.

The Canadaland Reddit story: what we know so far.

Canadaland doesn’t have a comments section, so years ago, someone created a Reddit page where people who love or hate the podcast can praise or criticize it. I only became aware of it after I started working at Canadaland.

It can be pleasant, a great source of stories, sometimes witty, and, yes, sometimes mean. It is Reddit, after all. That’s the vibe.

According to the stats, it’s very active: 13K weekly visitors, 1.3K weekly contributions.

A moderator, or mod, is a volunteer who runs the page. On this Reddit, it's someone with the handle “Notian.” Mods set the rules, and if a post is offensive, defamatory, or racist, it’s their job to delete it. They’re also the person you report issues to.

Jesse Brown does have some kind of relationship with Notian. Jesse has done “Ask Me Anything” Q&As on the Reddit page before.

According to Notian, Jesse asked them to add one of the Canadaland staff as a moderator (I don’t know when this happened, I can’t say who).

Notian says this employee was looking for sock-puppet accounts.

The employee then asked for access to the moderator’s mail function. This allowed them to private message people on Reddit — not as themselves or under an account name, but as the moderator. Essentially, people thought they were talking to Notian.

This is one of the messages a person on Reddit says they received from the account:

The link is to a page with a tracking device. One of the same links that I and dozens of others received in DMs and emails.

This is the moderator’s explanation.

Some accounts came forward to say they had also received links from burner accounts on Reddit.

To understand the other half of this, we have to turn to Mark Bourrie’s story.

Mark Bourrie’s story

According to Bourrie, Jesse Brown messaged him on Thursday, March 19, for an interview.

They connected by phone on Thursday night at 11 PM.

According to Bourrie: “Canadaland podcaster Jesse Brown called me at 11 p.m. Thursday night to ask for comment for a story accusing me of posting on Canadaland’s subreddit. I don’t know what the posts say, and I didn’t ask. Brown listed several Reddit names that I have never heard of.”

Bourrie denies having any Reddit accounts.

For context, Bourrie has previously published critiques of Jesse Brown and Canadaland on his site, Fair Press. It’s not clear why he would need an anonymous Reddit account—or why it would matter if he did have one, or two. Canadaland’s Reddit page has 13k people on it, after all.

After Jesse made the accusations, Bourrie said that Jesse sent him a link.

“He did send a link to a picture of me. It is from my high school yearbook. That’s pretty creepy,” wrote Bourrie.

Bourrie posted about the encounter on Substack and on X.

On X today, Bourrie says he has learned there was a tracker on that page, the one with the picture, and that Canadaland probably captured his IP address.

It seems that Jesse is trying to connect Bourrie’s IP address to the ones Canadaland gathered from Reddit for comparison.

I haven’t heard of Jesse reaching out to others who received the links.

So far, it appears to be mostly dozens of anonymous Reddit users, along with reporters he has clashed with - Rachel Gilmore, someone at the Maple, and Nora Loreto, and maybe a dozen others? I don’t know the complete list.

But the working theory is that Jesse is trying to link those others (perhaps including me) to anonymous Reddit accounts as well.

I have not spoken to Jesse, but other reporters have reached out. I am waiting to see what they discover.

At this point, the only thing that seems 100% confirmed is that a Canadaland staff member was sending tracking links via Reddit DMs while undercover as a mod on the platform, at Jesse’s direction.

Who was behind the CLTipster email or the social media burner accounts spreading the tracking link is not proven. Who else besides Canadaland would have done it? I can’t speculate.

Canadaland vs. Ottawa Citizen: Technical Differences

If this is an attempt to match Reddit accounts to IP addresses, the approach is similar, but Canadaland is being much messier than the Ottawa Citizen’s investigation.

The Ottawa Citizen sent a single link privately to a single account. It checked the IP address using several devices. The account was on a government server and had a fixed IP address.

Canadaland appears to have sent several links to different people, across various platforms, all directing them to what appear to be five pages on Canadaland—making matching far more difficult and less reliable.

They appear to be using only one tracker, whereas the Ottawa Citizen used several to corroborate the data.

Unless those users are on a government or corporate network (like the @Vikileaks30 account was), their IP addresses will be dynamic—meaning they change over time and aren’t fixed to a single device or location. They may also be using a VPN that disguises their location.

Another issue—and an important difference.

The page the Citizen used was unlisted. That means it wouldn’t show up in Google search results.

The pages Canadaland used were unlinked—meaning there was no way to navigate to them from the website. But not all of them were unlisted. Some appear to be indexed by Google and show up in search results.

That matters.

It means someone searching for Canadaland’s ethics policy or JSP could have landed on those pages and had their IP captured—not just the people who were sent the links.

That makes tracking messy because anyone could have landed on those pages, not just the individuals Canadaland was trying to track.

Some thoughts on ethics

I’ll be honest—I’m a little pisssed personally.

I dislike that Jesse posted an internal document with my name on it.

As I said before, the document is fairly innocuous.

But people did click and see my name, and once it became clear to me what was happening, I worried they might think I was somehow involved in this project.

Fortunately, enough people know how my working relationship with Jesse ended that it never crossed anyone’s mind that I was involved.

Putting myself and human resource policies aside, there’s the bigger question of journalism ethics.

That 2024 draft JSP—the one written by the Canadaland committee and now used as a baiting page—was not fully made public. That was just one page.

There were many sections, among them a section on clandestine news reporting.

The draft’s JSP’s approach was similar to the Ottawa Citizen’s approach: the default our team came up with was to always identify yourself.

The exception applies only if you can’t obtain the information any other way, and if there was a compelling-enough public interest service that warranted going undercover. And even then, always, obeying the laws that protect people’s legal rights. Journalism is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I suspect the draft JSP was never adapted, so I don’t know what ethical or legal lens Canadaland applied to this work.

For example, it is unclear what public interest Canadaland believed was served by this. We’ll find out when they publish.

In terms of legal rights, especially privacy rights, have evolved since the Ottawa Citizens’ investigation. There’s a lot of speculation about where they stand now, and I don’t fully know the answer in a case like this.

I’ve done open-source investigations that chase server addresses, etc., but what I do relies on publicly available information. IP addresses carry an expectation of privacy, but I don’t know how far that expectation extends. It may be a test case if someone decides to pursue it.

Again, I have not personally reached out to Jesse, but I know several reporters and listeners have. I expect Jesse will address what he was trying to do on the show this week.

I’m waiting to hear.