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OT- Rights in the USA and Canada and the world

Hi I read this in the latest

CRYPTO-GRAM
I was wondering what my friends down south think about it. It raises some interesting questions. As this is starting to occur in Canada as well I am looking for opinions. Also I would like opinions of other ways that other countries handle these issues.
February 15, 2004

by Bruce Schneier
Founder and CTO
Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.
schneier@counterpane.com

Toward Universal Surveillance

Last month the Supreme Court let stand the Justice Department's right
to secretly arrest non-citizen residents. Combined with the
government's power to designate foreign prisoners of war as "enemy
combatants" in order to ignore international treaties regulating their
incarceration, and their power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens
without charge or access to an attorney, the United States is looking
more and more like a police state.

Since 9/11, the Justice Department has asked for, and largely received,
additional powers that allow it to perform an unprecedented amount of
surveillance of American citizens and visitors. The USA PATRIOT Act,
passed in haste after 9/11, started the ball rolling. In December, a
provision slipped into an appropriations bill allowing the FBI to
obtain personal financial information from banks, insurance companies,
travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal
Service, jewelry stores, casinos, and car dealerships without a warrant
-- because they're all construed as financial institutions. Starting
this year, the U.S. government is photographing and fingerprinting
foreign visitors into this country from all but 27 other countries.

The litany continues. CAPPS-II, the government's vast computerized
system for probing the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights,
will be fielded this year. Total Information Awareness, a program that
would link diverse databases and allow the FBI to collate information
on all Americans, was halted at the federal level after a huge public
outcry, but is continuing at a state level with federal funding. Over
New Year's, the FBI collected the names of 260,000 people staying at
Las Vegas hotels. More and more, at every level of society, the "Big
Brother is Watching You" style of total surveillance is slowly becoming
a reality.

Security is a trade off. It makes no sense to ask whether a particular
security system is effective or not -- otherwise you'd all be wearing
bulletproof vests and staying immured in your home. The proper
question to ask is whether the trade-off is worth it. Is the level of
security gained worth the costs, whether in money, in liberties, in
privacy, or in convenience?

This is a personal decision, and one greatly influenced by the
situation. For most of us, bulletproof vests are not worth the cost
and inconvenience. For some of us, home burglar alarm systems
are. And most of us lock our doors at night.

Terrorism is no different. We need to weigh each security
countermeasure. Is the additional security against the risks worth the
costs? Are there smarter things we can be spending our money on? How
does the risk of terrorism compare with the risks in other aspects of
our lives: automobile accidents, domestic violence, industrial
pollution, and so on? Are there costs that are just too expensive for
us to bear?

Unfortunately, it's rare to hear this level of informed debate. Few
people remind us how minor the terrorist threat really is. Rarely do
we discuss how little identification has to do with security, and how
broad surveillance of everyone doesn't really prevent terrorism. And
where's the debate about what's more important: the freedoms and
liberties that have made America great or some temporary security?

Instead, the DOJ (fueled by a strong police mentality inside the
Administration) is directing our nation's political changes in response
to 9/11. And it's making trade-offs from its own subjective
perspective: trade-offs that benefit it even if they are to the
detriment of others.

From the point of view of the DOJ, judicial oversight is unnecessary
and unwarranted; doing away with it is a better trade off. They think
collecting information on everyone is a good idea, because they are
less concerned with the loss of privacy and liberty. Expensive
surveillance and data mining systems are a good trade-off for them
because more budget means even more power. And from their perspective,
secrecy is better than openness; if the police are absolutely
trustworthy, then there's nothing to be gained from a public process.

If you put the police in charge of security, the trade-offs they make
result in measures that resemble a police state.

This is wrong. The trade-offs are larger than the FBI or the
DOJ. Just as a company would never put a single department in charge
of its own budget, someone above the narrow perspective of the DOJ
needs to be balancing the country's needs and making decisions about
these security trade-offs.

The laws limiting police power were put in place to protect us from
police abuse. Privacy protects us from threats by government,
corporations, and individuals. And the greatest strength of our nation
comes from our freedoms, our openness, our liberties, and our system of
justice. Ben Franklin once said: "Those who would give up essential
liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety." Since 9/11 Americans have squandered an enormous amount of
liberty, and we didn't even get any temporary safety in return.