As a lawyer, I have to jump into this for a bit. The dominant assumption among Slashdotters seems to be that "more civil liberties = good; we want more good; therefore, we want more civil liberties, and anything that reduces them is bad."
This, of course, is idiotic. For example, the Supreme Court could radically increase privacy rights (part of your civil liberties) simply by requiring police to petition the Supreme Court (or State Supreme Court) for every search warrant. Obviously, that wouldn't be a good idea -- the average guy's privacy would receive no practical increase, police would be unable to investigate the simplest cases, and crime would shoot out of control.
Civil liberties isn't the ultimate good -- it's one of many competing goods in our legal system which must be balanced with other goods, like effective law enforcement and judicial speed.
The U.S. government's position simply seems to be that Canada has made an error in calculating what the best trade-off is. This isn't a crazy notion: Germany, for example, has (at least in the past decade or so) been a favorite place for terrorists and criminals to setup HQs precisely because they have strong privacy laws which make it difficult for the police to actively seek out these groups. The German concern with privacy is certainly understandable after the Nazi regime, but just because they have more privacy rights doesn't mean they are therefore unambiguously better off. Likewise for Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
As a lawyer, I have to jump into this for a bit. The dominant assumption among Slashdotters seems to be that "more civil liberties = good; we want more good; therefore, we want more civil liberties, and anything that reduces them is bad." This, of course, is idiotic. For example, the Supreme Court could radically increase privacy rights (part of your civil liberties) simply by requiring police to petition the Supreme Court (or State Supreme Court) for every search warrant. Obviously, that wouldn't be a good idea -- the average guy's privacy would receive no practical increase, police would be unable to investigate the simplest cases, and crime would shoot out of control. Civil liberties isn't the ultimate good -- it's one of many competing goods in our legal system which must be balanced with other goods, like effective law enforcement and judicial speed. The U.S. government's position simply seems to be that Canada has made an error in calculating what the best trade-off is. This isn't a crazy notion: Germany, for example, has (at least in the past decade or so) been a favorite place for terrorists and criminals to setup HQs precisely because they have strong privacy laws which make it difficult for the police to actively seek out these groups. The German concern with privacy is certainly understandable after the Nazi regime, but just because they have more privacy rights doesn't mean they are therefore unambiguously better off. Likewise for Canada.