Political Prisoner

Read this article about Canada's G20 political prisoner, Byron Sonne. Now ask yourself if you feel safer that he has been in custody for almost a year. In fact, the whole fiasco makes me even more uneasy because it suggests the security establishment is unable to distinguish real threats from false ones. That scares me because they used Sonne as a way to justify the security theatre by catching someone whether he represented a danger or not.

The more recent charge of "counselling to commit mischief not committed" is equally disturbing because, essentially, it turned the basic freedom of speech into a crime. When this charge was laid earlier this year, this happened in Zimbabwe. If one excludes the torture, which thankfully is not standard procedure in Canada (I'm sure some police wish it was), the rationale of the security forces is disturbingly similar. I did not refer to Sonne as a "political prisoner" for the sake of hyperbole.

Security Theatre

I wonder if the increasingly vocal backlash against the security theatre at airports will gather enough support to effect any change. I suspect it will take a lot more than what we have now before it will have any effect. It doesn't help that the politicians bypass the porn scanners and the "junk" groping, at least in the U.S., but I assume the same applies here in Canada.

What really bugs me is that this truly is security theatre. There are so many gaping holes in the security that it is inevitable that someone will get through. The worst part is that airport security is an old problem that the Israeli's solved a long time ago. Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport is considered to be the most secure airport in the world, and has been for well over thirty years. And they manage to do this without unduly inconveniencing passengers.

Why can't we learn from the experts?