Upon learning last week that the RCMP's Security Service - the precursor to CSIS - had dispatched undercover officers in the early '70s to infiltrate Canada's then-burgeoning women's movement and gather intelligence on those who participated in it, my first reaction was to laugh uproariously.

I couldn't help myself, particularly since Rita MacNeil was specifically named in one of the many RCMP memos written at the time; flagged, it would seem, because she belonged to the Toronto Women's Caucus and wrote songs about women's issues. (And here I thought she was just a sweet, hat-wearing lady from Cape Breton who overcame geographic isolation, childhood surgery for a cleft palate, extreme shyness, failed relationships and all sorts of mean-spirited public jabs about her weight to become a multiple award-winning singer and, in some circles, a beloved Canadian quasi-icon.)

If you're the kind of person who gets a kick out of outdated language informed by stereotypes, the story gets even funnier: Declassified documents discovered by historians Steve Hewitt and Christabelle Sethna include field notes from a 1972 gathering of various women's groups in Winnipeg (Ooh - a local connection!), in which an undercover officer describes witnessing "100 sweating, uncombed women standing in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing."

What - no mention of leg hair?

All mockery aside, the real question that deserves to be asked here is why something that happened more than three decades ago should be considered newsworthy and/or relevant today?

A bunch of online commentat0rs have already dismissed this story as a slow-news-day fluff piece, while others have pointed out that the Canadian government was spying on pretty much everyone in the late '60s and early '70s in an effort to root out Communists (who, at the time, would have been considered a significant threat to national security), making this specific example nothing special and, certainly, nothing new.

However, that latter line of reasoning underscores exactly why this story deserves some attention.

Three decades ago, ignorance and fear created an environment in which the state - ostensibly for the collective safety of all Canadians - was allowed to keep dossiers on (and occasionally persecute) any individual or group whose actions or beliefs didn't match up with those of the accepted status quo.

It's a mindset that persists today with different targets but with equally predictable results. Yesterday's Communists are today's terrorists, and in our post-9/11 world, it's now completely acceptable for those in positions of authority to tap civilians' phones without a warrant, or arrest people without telling them why and incarcerate them in Millhaven for a few years, or send provincial police officers dressed up as activists into a demonstration against the North American Leader's Summit.

Except, of course, that it's not acceptable. State-sanctioned surveillance may very well be a long-standing Canadian tradition, but that doesn't necessarily make it OK.

In fact, despite my initial reaction to last week's news, it's not all that funny, either.