Civil Rights | The Finlay Centre for Corporate & Public Governance

America’s Assault on Privacy

Terrorist threat ratings for law abiding travelers that can’t be challenged are reminiscent of totalitarian tactics which the United States so long fought.

Neville Hobson, a respected blogger and innovator in the changing field of social media raises some important points on the terrorist rating system to which travelers to the US are being subjected. “Can’t be rescinded, not even questioned,” as the line goes from the movie Casablanca, seems an apt description. There is no provision for amending an inaccurate terrorist rating. You can’t even see it. In a world war against fascism and a very long cold war against communism, America fought the encroachment of a big brother who kept track of everyone and accorded civil rights to no one. What has happened to this once gleaming pillar of civil rights so long an inspiration to freedom loving people? What has become of the spirit of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King?

I have been following Mr. Hobson’s reports faithfully for several years. They are a model of British restraint and proportionality. They also have a significant following around the globe. He is clearly not alone in questioning the principles and management behind such a program. The troubling fact is that the misdirected thinking and policy miscues that brought America to its current calamitous course in Iraq also seem to be manifesting themselves at home in the government’s dealings with its own citizens and those of its allies.

I have written at Finlay On Governance recently here and here about the direction of the United States, a country where I have lived, more than occasionally work and have many family members. I believe America is only now awakening to how misguided its course in the world has become. It is apparent that the assault launched by the U.S. government on the privacy and civil liberties of its own citizens, as well as those of its supporters and allies like Mr. Hobson, is far greater than any outside enemy could ever inflict.

No right thinking member of the civilized world wishes to see America, or any other country for that matter, vulnerable to attack at the hands of terrorists. But the war on terror must not be permitted to become a war on the privacy of law abiding people, otherwise the terrorists have won a victory of a kind they never could have dreamed.

Perhaps the current soul-searching in America about its ever more costly missteps involving the Middle East, and the change of political landscape that occurred in November, will begin to prompt a larger rethinking about the need to preserve those values of liberty and civil rights for which America has been a beacon to the world, but the light of which has sadly grown more dim in recent years.

Of Patio Umbrellas and Absentee Owners

A nuclear North Korea; a superpower’s foreign policy in tatters show why sound governance really matters.

And so it comes to this. After the most colossal bungling of foreign policy in more than a century through a misguided and deceitful quest for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by the United States, the free and civilized world must now rely upon a totalitarian dictatorship in China to deal with a North Korea that openly displays its nuclear ability. And the West can take further note that its addiction to cheap consumer goods from China, North Korea’s most prominent sponsor, has helped to finance Kim Jong-Il’s nightmare nuclear ambitions.

Not that it was needed, but all this is just more evidence that Winston Churchill really has left the building. Where once giants strode on the world stage, we are now saddled with a collection of smaller than life actors whose reputation and soundness of judgment seem to be receding with each passing day. And so we lurch from maculation in Iraq, where there was no threat to civilization, and chaos in Afghanistan, where the blood of too many Canadians is being spilled to make that country safer for the drug lords who reap a harvest of hypocrisy from record poppy production, to the mishandling of the psychopaths in Pyongyang, who pose one of the most real and present dangers the world has ever known. Because of its ineptitude in Iraq and other manifestations of a discredited and ineffectual foreign policy elsewhere, the United States has become much smaller in influence and standing at the exact moment when its strength and credibility are desperately required. The world saw the benefits of that strength and credibility during times of crisis in the eras of Roosevelt and Kennedy. We cannot yet foresee the full extent of the damage brought on by America’s ongoing misdirected course, but a further collision with reality seems almost certain. The West’s having to delegate its peace and security to another communist dictatorship –and no amount of patio umbrellas and sneaker exports will change that fact– clearly demonstrates that some serious changes have taken place in the geopolitical landscape without much thought or discussion given to their consequences.

Entrusting power to others, which is what is meant by our system of free markets and democratic values, carries with it a duty to hold its custodians to account for its proper use. Power is provided in the form of votes, public expressions of approval or the absence of it, and in the kind of purchases we make and with whom we do business. The truth is none of us can afford to take a vacation from the stakeholder responsibilities we all have as citizens, consumers and investors, and when we do, the results can be chilling.