‘Big Brother’ ups the ante

Islamic State and all the other jihadists don’t give a damn if Western democracies mutilate their own freedoms as it doesn’t significantly restrict their own operations

Left wing, right wing, it makes no difference. Almost every elected government, confronted with the slightest “terrorist threat”, responds by att acking the civil liberties of its own citizens. And the citizens often cheer them on. Last week, the French government passed a new bill through the National Assembly that expanded the powers of the country’s intelligence services. French intelligence agents will be free to plant cameras and recording devices in private homes and cars, intercept phone conversations without judicial oversight, even install keylogger devices that record every stroke on a targeted computer in real time.

It was allegedly a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks that killed 17 people in Paris in January, but the security services were just waiting for an excuse.

Indeed, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the law was needed to give a legal framework to intelligence agents who are already pursuing some of these practices illegally. France, he explained, has never “had to face this kind of terrorism in our history”.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Defence Minister Jason Kenney was justifying a similar over-reaction by saying “the threat of terrorism has never been greater”. Really?

Since 9/11, there had never been a terrorist attack in Canada until last October, when two Canadian soldiers were killed in separate incidents. Both were low-tech, “lone wolf” attacks by Canadian converts to Islam – in one, the murder weapon was simply a car – but the public (or, at least, the media) got so excited the government felt the need to “do something.”

The Anti-Terrorism Act, which has just passed the Canadian House of Commons, gives the Canadian Security Intelligence Service the right to make “preventive” arrests in Canada. It lets police arrest and detain individuals without charge for up to seven days. In short, it’s the usual smorgasbord of crowd-pleasing measures politicians throw out when they want to look tough.

France has 65 million people and it lost 17 of them to terrorism in the past year. Canada has 36 million people and has lost precisely two of them to domestic terrorism in the past 20 years. In what way were those lives more valuable than those of the hundreds of people who die each year in France and Canada from less newsworthy crimes of violence like murder?

The cruel truth is we put a higher value on the lives of those killed in terrorist attacks because they get more publicity. That’s why, in an opinion poll last month, nearly two-thirds of French people were in favour of restricting freedoms in the name of fighting extremism – and the French parliament passed the new security law by 438 votes to 86.

The government in France is Socialist, but the centre-right opposition also supported the new law. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada is right-wing, but the centre-right Liberals were equally unwilling to risk unpopularity by opposing it.

On the other hand, the centre-left New Democrats and the Greens voted against, and the vote was closer in Canada: 183 to 96.

Maybe the difference just reflects the smaller scale of the attacks in Canada, but full credit to Canadians for getting past the knee-jerk phase of their response to terrorism.

Islamic State and all the other jihadists don’t give a damn if Western democracies mutilate their own freedoms as it doesn’t significantly restrict their own operations. The only real winners are the security forces.