Privacy Breach Nothing Less Than Frightening

(Aired on September 22, 2010)

Imagine you are fighting for something.  You have a cause that is completely righteous in your eyes, and in fighting for it, you make your fair share of enemies - including people in the government.  Now imagine those enemies have information about you that no one else should have.  That includes your banking information and your medical information.  It even includes a psychiatric report, spelled out in painstaking detail.

That's exactly what has happened to Sean Bruyea.  He has been an outspoken critic of Veterans Affairs for a long time, and certainly made himself a lot of enemies.  In 2006, Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson found that personal information relating Bruyea in his briefing notes.  That means that someone, likely in the bureaucracy, managed to dredge those documents up.

How that happened is the scary part.  It is quite frightening that, given enough impetus, people who don't like you can find your most sensitive information and potentially use it against you.  That's a paranoia-inducing reality of Orwellian proportions.

It's imperative that there be a full investigation into how this happened.  That investigation, interestingly for us, could unearth former MP Betty Hinton, who has made herself scarce since deciding not to run in the last federal election.  Hinton was once Greg Thompson's parliamentary secretary, a position she once famously mistook for a cabinet seat.

The investigation is crucial, not just for Mr. Bruyea himself, but for the principle of the thing.  It's an egregious incident, and we need to know that it is an isolated one.