The war on whistle-blowers

This complacency of the corporate media has allowed police and security agencies to increase their powers of surveillance, search, arrest, and punishment. The security agencies have sought new laws and flexed old laws to extend their powers. Uncomfortable truths about government blunders, embarrassments, and outright illegal acts, are now being hidden from the public right to know through the guise of the term ‘national security’.

The increasing complexity of government, especially the exponential growth of security agencies under the war on terror with rapid telecommunications and computer technology development has enabled the development of these agencies to an Orwellian scale.

This is the Assange Effect. The authorities are getting away with their harassment of Assange, so any other potential whistle-blower or journalist will think twice about exposing what they believe the public has a right to know. Fear is being created as an implicit form of censorship.

The case of Australian Tax Office whistle-blower Richard Boyle showed other potential whistle-blowers, if you deluge government information be prepared to be taken down in anyway necessary.

The branded and packaged ‘war on terror’ enabled governments to build up a massive surveillance structure over its own citizens. Now the ‘war on whistle-blowers’ is commencing where the ‘dark part’ of government that is always there no matter what political party governs is attempting to take away the public’s right to know.

Our concern is do we want police and security organizations in our democratic societies to have this much influence?

The only weapon the public has left against over-zealous police and security agencies is public outrage. This is in play now in San Francisco in the Carmody case now and may be a lesson in the other cases mentioned and future cases that will no doubt arise very soon.