Canadians show value of snooping

NY Times:

THE roundup of 17 terror suspects in the Toronto area — all residents of Canada — has inspired a flurry of calls in Washington for new protections against home-grown attacks.

Some members of Congress have demanded regulating the sale of a popular fertilizer, which can be used to make bombs. Others want better border security and more scrutiny of the tens of millions of people who cross into the United States from Canada each year.

But the case has also raised a broader debate about the United States' counterterrorism techniques. If radical Islamic terrorists emerge from within, border agents and port inspectors are unlikely to catch them. Better to use, some security experts say, a controversial tool in the war on terror: domestic intelligence and snooping.

Broad-brush surveillance — using informants or high-tech snooping tools to indiscriminately watch Muslim or Arab groups — is improper and ineffective, said Kareem Shora, legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington. Escalating such efforts now would surely create waves of protest similar to those that washed over the National Security Agency for eavesdropping on domestic telephone calls without warrants.

"You are just increasing the size of the haystack," Mr. Shora said. "Are you going to monitor everyone? Do we want to become a police state?"

While he and others argue that domestic terrorism can be prevented through other means, others see an inevitable conflict brewing.

"It will be very difficult to detect homegrown terrorists without running into this direct clash," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond who studies terrorism cases. Consider the profile of Steven Vikash Chand, who Canadian officials say planned to storm the Parliament in Ottawa and behead the prime minister.

Mr. Chand, 25, a native of Toronto, may have been inspired by Al Qaeda, but he had no apparent link to its leaders, investigators have said. Mr. Chand worked at a Middle Eastern restaurant near Toronto and even briefly served as a member of the Canadian armed forces, hardly the profile of the international terrorist.

Before making the arrests, the authorities spent months, and perhaps more than a year, monitoring Mr. Chand and others, tracking them through Internet chat rooms, e-mail messages and telephone communications, Canadian and American law enforcement officials have said. Only after the group tried to buy ammonium nitrate — a fertilizer that can be used to build a bomb — did officials intervene.

...

The nature of this case has struck the anti war left mute. It destroys most of their assumptions about the enemy and how to fight him. While this story was in the NY Times it was buried for the same reason.