A key difference:<p>You were employed by a private party. The muzzled scientists were employed by the citizens of Canada.<p>To make your example comparable, you would have been employed by an attorney on behalf of the attorney&#x27;s client, and then the information you found would have been withheld from the client who was paying for it. I&#x27;m not saying that doesn&#x27;t happen, but it would be a breach of ethics on the part of the attorney to do so. Just as, in this case, it was a breach of ethics for the Canadian government to force scientists to withhold information from the people of Canada.