In Britain, the home of habeus corpus and the Magna Carta, the London 2012 Olympics are serving as the excuse to give police powers to inspect postal packages for drugs, track individuals through the use of CCTV and electronic travel passes, and identify suspects through their relatives' DNA stored among the 3 million samples held in the nation's DNA database...

Canadian human rights attorney and author Maureen Webb discusses the comprehensive scope of government surveillance, and finds that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects...

The government is tracking your transactions to help find terror suspects -- a move that makes about as much sense as assigning guilt based on Google keyword searches...

The story which broke on Friday about a traveler risk scoring system called the Automated Targeting System, or "ATS," evokes an image of an Orwellian world in which the State compiles a secret dossier on every individual and sorts the population according to secret criteria, assigning each person a "risk score."...

Congress is considering three bills to "reform" massive surveillance programs. But secret facilities around the country are already eavesdropping on Americans.

The FBI has been abusing its powers under the PATRIOT Act to obtain highly personal information on American citizens. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says he is going to get to the bottom of it and "make things right as quickly as possible". FBI Director Robert Meuller blames himself for not putting more safeguards in place...

Here’s Spyin’ on You, Kid.
By Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Maureen Webb is Co-Chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a member of  Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada and a co-founder of the  Campaign Against Mass Surveillance. Her first book, Illusions of Security, begins with the story of Ottawa residents, and Canadian citizens, Maher and Monia Arar. On the basis of a casual friendship between Maher and Abdullah Amalki, the brother of a coworker, Maher was renditioned from the United States, where he had been to waiting for a connecting flight to Montreal, to a Syrian prison. He remained in the prison for a year during which he was frequently tortured. . . .