To suggest that such a sweeping increase in surveillance will prevent "terrorism"is seriously questionable. Acts of mass violence in the United States and other countries are increasingly the work of a single actor, or a few, and prevention by surveillance or other means of intelligence is an acknowledged non-starter.
As an example, England has upwards of 4.3 million CCTV cameras, most in London. While law enforcement agencies support them, the same agencies admit they have not prevented any serious crime, particularly violent crime. Meantime, the average Londoner has his or her photograph taken 300 times a day without permission.
The question of effectiveness needs address, as does duration.
Any such infringement of liberty ought to be limited in duration of time. It ought to be subject to periodic review, especially to demand proven usefulness against identified social danger -- otherwise, today's surveillance against terrorist threat becomes tomorrows' suppression of dissent.
In authoritarian states intelligence agencies are conventionally used for social control, like the Stasi of East Germany in the Cold War. Democracies have a similar history, as the FBI under J Edgar Hoover kept tabs not only on suspected communists but on Quakers and other anti-war groups, chilling dissent when it was most needed.
We need to look at the mass surveillance proposition from perspective of cost-benefit analysis and ask: Is the cure worse than the disease?
Make no mistake -- what's at risk is the right to privacy. It's at the pinnacle of the rights citizens have wrested from their rulers over the centuries in the course of developing the self-determined rule we call democracy.
Arbitrariness was the earmark of the earlier systems of justice, in which even the right to life was non-existent. From that pit we've climbed through the right to life, the right to property, the right to elect one's government, all the way to the fundamental right to privacy of an individual in a modern state.
Perhaps the definitive article was written in the Harvard Law Review of December 15, 1890, by the future US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1916-1939) -- http://bit.ly/1hOespa. In The Right to Privacy, Brandeis stressed that given the increasing capacity of government, the press, and other agencies to invade personal activity, the right of privacy, to be left alone, was the cornerstone of individual freedom in the modern age.
We need a national conversation before ceding that right -- the product of ages of struggle -- to any temporary government. It's hard to imagine our willingness to throw away the birthright product of centuries of struggle from Magna Carta on down for the mess of pottage that is prevention of a noun, "terrorism".
Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, noted that the gun which appears so unobtrusively in the first act will inevitably be fired off by the third act. As applied to the surveillance state, the methods so enthusiastically promoted as necessary for safety and protection of citizens from foreign threat have historically proven just as useful to protect government itself from accountability and dissent.
�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
