Federation for Accountability, Freedom, and Oversight (FAFO Labs)
Draft 1.0 – Calgary, Alberta, July 19, 2025
We are not sovereign citizens. We are not anarchists. We are not ideologues.
We are citizens. We are investigators. We are defenders of a democracy being hollowed from within.
First Principles
→ Decentralization. Power dispersed is power accountable.
→ Procedural legitimacy. Rules that cannot be explained cannot be just.
→ Substantive democracy. Participation beyond performance.
→ Radical transparency. Sunlight as civic infrastructure.
→ Absolute speech. The right to know, the right to tell.
→ Liberty as practice, not platitude.
We do not condemn taxation. We do not reject public institutions. We reject only the opaque, the unaccountable, and the arbitrary.
We do not worship chaos. We do not call for collapse. But we will light flares when others stay silent. Because silence is not neutrality—it is complicity.
The Problem
Democracy was once the soul of this country. But year by year, signature by signature, redaction by redaction, we are witnessing not just drift toward meaningless proceduralism, but the rise of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil—bureaucratic power that no longer feels it must explain itself.
What Carl Schmitt understood as the sovereign exception—the power to decide when rules don’t apply—has become the everyday norm. What Michel Foucault mapped as disciplinary power now operates through algorithmic opacity and administrative silence. What James C. Scott called “seeing like a state”—the reduction of complex realities to manageable abstractions—has become seeing for the state while citizens are left blind.
This is not conspiracy. This is structure. And structure can be changed.
Our Methods
We test the system through:
Information warfare: Mass FOIA campaigns, records digitization, database construction. If they bury information, we dig it up and make it searchable.
Process mapping: Government meetings livestreamed, transcribed, analyzed. Budgets translated into plain language. Legislative tracking that shows who voted for what and why.
Network analysis: Following the money, the relationships, the patterns of influence that official channels obscure.
Direct engagement: Not just watching but participating—attending meetings, asking questions, demanding answers, creating public records of evasion.
Infrastructure building: Tools that make transparency sustainable, not just sensational.
The Stakes
An armed citizenry is not just a metaphor. But even that means nothing if citizens are not armed with truth.
The instrumentalization of public apathy is a weapon. The only way to disarm it is with knowledge that becomes action.
We are not accelerationists. We are witnesses. And we are participants. Because democracy is not a inheritance—it is a practice. And like any practice, it atrophies without use.
The Call
We are FAFO Labs. We are here to test the system. To expose what is hidden. To hold accountable those who believe no one is watching.
Because someone is. Now. Forever.
Your government is fucking around. Help us help them find out.
Federation for Accountability, Freedom, and Oversight
Transparency is not a courtesy. It is a requirement.