Hot on the heels of the latest round of Islamist attacks, this week the federal government introduced yet another anti-terrorism bill.
Stephen Harper told the country the bill will make us safer, painting a picture of jihadist terrorists lurking around every lamp post, their numerous diabolical plots narrowly thwarted by our national security agencies.
How many plots and what type are details the Canadian public will conveniently never hear about.
But like other similar measures that have gone before, the bill expands state powers of surveillance and detention of those security forces deem to be potential threats.
Now, targets in the line of security crosshairs don’t even have to be connected to a specific threat. General advocacy of an attack on Canada is enough to get them locked up. Even turning to “radicalized” beliefs could be enough to earn a visit from CSIS.
Those are measures a portion of the population might support, but they also border on thought police.
The term CSIS and the government prefer is ‘disruption’ — which could now involve everything from deleting websites and twitter postings, blocking cell phone signals, bugging apartments and longer periods of ‘preventative detention.’
None of which seems threatening, until it’s your thoughts that are deemed unacceptable by the state.
Civil liberties groups have voiced concerns about the new powers being granted to CSIS.
Lack of strong oversight is a major flaw in this process.
When Big Brother is watching, someone else needs to keep close tabs on the watchers in return.
