Most people believe that freedom has its limits.  To drive a motor car in certain ways is just not acceptable.  Freedom of speech is not permitted when it libels someone.  But most folk believe that allowing the police to com into your house without a warrant from a Court, is also unacceptable.  I am going to challenge those generally-accepted views.  It is my belief that we are going to have to accept a much greater surveillance by authority than we have up to this date.  The IRA showed the world that dedicated people can cause enormous damage to life, limb, and property just by putting mundane things together in a particular way.  Bombs made from fertiliser, are a specific example.

The general public are becoming more and more able to do things that are a great risk to society in general.  At one time it was believed that the criminal would stop at actions that risked his own well-being.  That belief has been shown to be false.  Suicide bombers are motivated to do things simply to harm their perceived enemy.  It is my belief that most, if not all, of these people are not free agents, but are leaned on very heavily by the real villains.  There have always been evil people, and I see no likelihood of that situation changing until the medical world is able to study the mind of people.  And at my guess, that is at least a hundred years into the future.  By that time the world will have changed so radically, that this essay will be totally redundant.

Do you value your freedom to live without obvious surveillance, more than your physical bell-being.  This simple question is at the heart of the problem.  For myself I find no great problem with a copper knocking on my door just after I have gone to bed saying "We  believe that you are doing something illegal in your shed.  We want to look; we are coming in now.  I'd probably inwardly curse in the same way that I would if I missed my train to work as a result of of some loon driving into the back of a bus and holding up a street-full of traffic.  It would be a rare event, but if I thought it stopped a bomb being prepared, I would willingly forgo my "freedom" for that purpose.

With a properly set up system, the man-in-the-street would be under constant surveillance.  But why should anyone object to being watched if he/she has done nothing wrong.  I know there are people who object to being watched, on principle.  I had an uncle who fell into that category.  But he had such sticky fingers that he must have been constantly worried that the police would find out.  He has passed on some years back, but to give you a flavour of his ethic, when he and my mother lived at home with their mother. he stole my mother's engagement ring from her bedroom and pawned it.  He was found out when his mother found the pawn ticket.  It is this type of person who will object the loudest at being under constant surveillance.  And, of course, there are the REAL criminals who would kill thousands just to get their own back on a society that they feel is oppressing them.  These are the real dangerous people that have to be thwarted.  And it is only by constant watching that these type of people will be caught.