The Calibration of Rights

It is widely accepted that in order to protect our freedom we must acknowledge that it must be curtailed by balancing it against security imperatives. In The Freedom of Security: Governing Canada in the Age of Counter-Terrorism, Colleen Bell argues the opposite. Our notions of freedom do not act as a counterweight to security but rather add to its mass and power; ideas about security and freedom, says Bell, are mutually reinforcing.

From Orwell’s 1984 to Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, novels have often made us look afresh at the relationship between security and freedom and their impact on human existence. For many readers, The Freedom of Security will have a comparable effect. Bell emphasizes security’s intrinsic contradictions. Most importantly, the more resources a society expends on security, the more its members tend to obsess about threats real or imagined, often with the active participation of the security apparatus explicitly...