Canada Terror Arrests Show Surveillance Can Be Beneficial

"You are just increasing the size of the haystack," 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. Chand, 25, a native of Toronto, may have been inspired by al-Qaida, but he had no apparent link to its leaders, investigators have said. Before making the arrests, the authorities spent months, and perhaps more than a year, monitoring Chand and others, tracking them through Internet chat rooms, e-mail messages and telephone communications, Canadian and U.S. 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. http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/14789854.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

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