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Hacker collective Anonymous has sent Quebec’s political and media classes into a fit by posting a two-hour video on YouTube that shows the highlights of a swanky birthday party Power Corp. founder Paul Desmarais threw for his wife, Jacqueline.

In an instant, the Internet activists have served warning to Canada’s billionaires that their private lives are fair game for public consumption. But the only thing they’ve really proven is that their list of enemies is terribly indiscriminate. Hacking into the emails of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to reveal how his wife shopped for luxury goods online while his army cracked down hard on protesters, as Anonymous did this year, is one thing. Exposing the intimate moments of a family whose only victims have been a few pheasants hunted for sport is quite another.

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‘Anonymous’s motive seems to be all about embarrassing a powerful family’

“I saw in this video a vulgar display of wealth,” lawyer and former Parti Québécois cabinet minister Richard Le Hir declared Thursday on Quebecor Inc.’s all-news station LCN. “It had something indecent and obscene about it. It’s bling-bling to death.”