Every single day, 3,000 people in the world die and some 100,000 are injured, many of them seriously. They are not killed by disease. And more importantly, they are not killed by terrorism. They are killed in automobile wrecks. Measured against this horrific death toll, the murders by Al-Qaeda and its satraps in the seven years since 9/11, even including the savage terrorist butchery in Iraq, equates to just a few weeks’ worth of roadside carnage. Yet such is the prominence given to the US-led war on international terror that massive new surveillance nets have been created and draconian procedures set in place, for instance for international travelers, all in the name of security.

But security for what? In the case of America and Britain, it is hardly security for the freedoms that they still seek to claim underpin their national ways of life. The UK is now one of the most security-monitored societies in the world. Kim Jong-il and his repressive regime in North Korea would give their eyeteeth to be able to afford the extensive network of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) installations that now watch ordinary Britons as they go about their daily lives. No other country boasts so many CCTV cameras.

Had North Korea many international visitors, its border police would envy and admire the way that US immigration officials treat arrivals in their country, the constant suspicion, the frequent detentions of people whose names or profiles happen to match someone else on the wanted list of one federal agency or another. Innocent travelers to the US have been held and interrogated sometimes for weeks until released without a word of apology or explanation and certainly without compensation.

In the UK, as the revelation that an MP, Sadiq Khan, was bugged by the security service while talking in prison to a terror suspect, who was also a constituent and childhood friend, has demonstrated that even British legislators, who by custom have been immune from such surveillance are now fair game. More worryingly it seems that government ministers knew nothing about this snooping. In a democratic society, where power rests ultimately with elected representatives, it is not right that police and intelligence officers, for all the important work they do in combating terror threats, should be acting independently of political control.

Yet this is a logical outcome of the terrorist hare that authorities around the world have set running. Just as PLO plane hijackings in the 1970s turned international air travel into an often-cumbersome ordeal, so the threat posed by a few thousand mindless bigots has encouraged the growth of increasingly intrusive and paranoid behavior by the forces of law and order. There is a balance to be struck and a strong argument that it has been missed, with the scales swinging alarmingly toward repression, in the name of countering a threat that is markedly less than motorists and pedestrians face every day.