Summer Letters

This Note Will Self-Destruct . . .
I read Hal Niedzviecki’s article “The Spy Who Blogged Me” (May), which discusses camera surveillance, with great interest. Of course, this kind of surveillance is only a small part of the post-9/11 picture. Not only are we being videotaped as we go about our daily lives, but our travel, financial transactions, phone calls, emails, and cell-phone locations are also being tracked. Programs and companies with names like Terrorism Information Awareness, Server in the Sky, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, and Quantum Leap Innovations ensure that the virtual trail of information we leave behind us each day is captured, stored, and made available to state agents in dossiers that reveal far more about us than video alone might.

Historically, the scope of law enforcement and security intelligence agencies has been limited to looking at specific threats in specific circles, and following leads from there outward. But surveillance has become much more generalized since 9/11. The old model of tailing known bad guys, or guys suspected on reasonable grounds of being bad, is being subsumed by a new model of mass surveillance, in which states engage in the continuous collection of information on entire populations. In this model, surveillance is used not merely to follow up on leads, but to generate them. More alarming, with the help of new data mining technologies, it is being used to assess the risk each of us poses to the state, to predict who might be a terrorist. In this project, the private sector is being harnessed as an agent of the state, and surveillance systems are becoming increasingly globalized.

Niedzviecki asks why nobody seems to care, and it’s partly that these systems have been implemented in an incremental, technocratic manner, outside ordinary democratic processes, and therefore off the radar of the public and even elected representatives. But as he indicates, there is also widespread apathy about, if not outright acceptance of, increased surveillance in Western countries, none of which have seriously debated the full implications. With the recent speed of change, we are still too busy playing with these toys. We haven’t figured out whether any of them actually makes us safer, nor at what point their potential benefits outweigh the harm they wreak on our democratic way of life.Citizens are the proverbial frog swimming in water the state is slowly bringing to a boil. We thought we learned something with the case of Maher Arar. Sadly, it will take a lot of John Smiths being detained, rendered, denied jobs or mobility across the border, or linked to crimes they did not commit before a critical mass of citizens wakes up to the fact that we are living in a society where the freedoms we once took for granted are subject to new regimes of permission, and where any of us — Muslim or not — could be swept off the street based on a flawed “risk assessment.”

Maureen Webb
author, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World
Ottawa, ON

After reading “The Spy Who Blogged Me,” I was intrigued to come across a survey form, bound into the magazine, on which over half the questions addressed my personal life: how much money comes into the family annually, what we are likely to invest in, what we do in our spare time — it even asked about our alcohol intake. Did anyone else see the irony in this?

Ellen Pegg
Weyburn, SK

Tanks for Nothing
George Fetherling inappropriately lumps the Institute for Research on Public Policy into the group of think tanks he disparages in his May article, “In the Tank.”

“Given their corporate funders and ideological leanings,” he writes, “most Canadian think tanks tend toward predictable viewpoints.” Not the irpp, which is fiercely independent. We do not have members, do not rely on external funding, and hence are not beholden to anyone. In recent years, our board has been graced by former university presidents, academics, and politicos from across the spectrum, such as Bob Rae, Stephen Harper, John Manley, and Barbara McDougall. Our research is not passed through an ideological filter.