Who'll watch the watchers?

Hot on the heels of the latest round of Islamist attacks, this week the federal government introduced yet another anti-terrorism bill.

Stephen Harper told the country the bill will make us safer, painting a picture of jihadist terrorists lurking around every lamp post, their numerous diabolical plots narrowly thwarted by our national security agencies.

How many plots and what type are details the Canadian public will conveniently never hear about.

But like other similar measures that have gone before, the bill expands state powers of surveillance and detention of those security forces deem to be potential threats.

Now, targets in the line of security crosshairs don't even have to be connected to a specific threat. General advocacy of an attack on Canada is enough to get them locked up. Even turning to "radicalized" beliefs could be enough to earn a visit from CSIS.

Those are measures a portion of the population might support, but they also border on thought police.

The term CSIS and the government prefer is "disruption" - which could now involve everything from deleting websites and Twitter postings to blocking cellphone signals, bugging apartments and longer periods of "preventative detention." None of which seems threatening, until it's your thoughts that are deemed unacceptable by the state.

Civil liberties groups have voiced concerns about the new powers being granted to CSIS.

We don't agree with all of those civil libertarians. We don't believe this is a sign we either lack patriotism or are weak-kneed when it comes to national security.

We also don't believe there is an unfettered right to freedom of speech. In Canada we recognize that yelling "fire" in a movie theatre is not without  legal consequences.

We also make sharp distinctions, or did at one time in Canada, between opinions based on beliefs we may disagree with and speech that is motivated by hatred and seeks to incite harm against a group of people based on their religion or other defining characteristic.

Calling for the death of anyone is certainly against the law and should have legal consequences. But an individual just having "radical" beliefs should clearly not be illegal or trigger detention.

We might be a little less concerned if there was some sort of strong oversight in this process. But there isn't.

When Big Brother is watching, someone else needs to keep close tabs on the watchers in return.