The Whistleblower vs Watership Down Syndrome

So that's what a real hero sounds like.

We don't talk much about freedom vs security up here in Canada, do we?
Sure we were taken aback when a 2009 RCMP mission statement colour-coded its surveillance subjects in advance of the G8/20 summit, warning of :

"notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations' resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

... following which the Harper Government™ spent nearly $1-billion deploying 19,000 security personnel to make the largest mass arrest of 1,100 peaceful protesters in Canadian history.

But mostly we are pretty contented sufferers of Watership Down Syndrome : as long as the farmer supplies us with carrots on a more or less regular basis, we accept that some random noisome bunnies are going to get slipped a noose from time to time and, in exchange for a continued supply of carrots, we will never mention them again.

Then again, as Edward Snowden points out above, what happens when a new farmer makes changes to his end of the deal and it's too late for us to change ours?
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Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now : A Massive Surveillance State

The National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major internet companies -- including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook

The Guardian : The NSA Files

Michael Geist : Why Canadians Should Be Demanding Answers About Secret Surveillance Programs

The Sixth Estate : The Obama Snooping Scandal and the Inevitability of the Surveillance State and Mass Surveillance: Shamrock, Prism, and Supercomputers

Ian Welsh : The Logic of the Surveillance State

Juan Cole : PRISM : The US Government is mad at Bradley Manning for doing to it what it is doing to all of us

Ronald Diebert in the Star: U.S. online snooping: What Canadians need to know

Update : Touché from Purple Library Guy in comments :

"... except actually the bunnies got a better deal. In our case, we have a farmer who isn't actually supplying any carrots, just propagandizing us into fearing that if we don't let him keep doing his thing, some evil terrorist/commie/feminist/whatever will take our carrots away."

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