It was not surprising to hear that the President of France has said that they need to reconsider some of their laws.  The fact of the matter is that at the moment terrorists are exploiting the freedom and rights given to the citizens of some of the freest countries in the world to attack them.  It raises an interesting dilemma as to what to do and there are always those, especially those who have never been affected by such forms of violence and believe that civil liberties must never be trampled upon or never touched and there will always be governments who believe that they need to be in order to keep the people safer.  Of course, those very same governments often use those laws against the people, and we have no finer example of that than our previous apartheid government in South Africa who exploited all sorts of legislation, designed to purportedly combat the terrorism, to attack anybody who opposed their government.  

So it is probably an even more sensitive subject in South Africa, but one cannot help but feel in these ever changing times that governments will  have to keep a closer watch on people, they will have to monitor internet traffic, text and mobile calls and I am not sure that those who have exposed these programmes are really “heroes”.  The bottom line is most of these terrorists come from secular states, where there is almost no freedom, and they use the freedoms and the civil liberties of those countries they attack to walk around with impunity and not be subject to spot-checks, or having their e-mail or calls intercepted.  That is one of the thoughts and debates one has to think about in a time where one is seeing more and more global terrorism from groups like ISIS and of course another aspect will be the fact that governments around the world, particularly those that are targeted or feel that they may be targeted, will have to devote bigger amounts of government expenditure towards more security police, more surveillance equipment and specialists and all of that comes at a cost to taxpayers.  Apparently to monitor somebody 24/7 requires a team of approximately 15 people and France alone has a few thousand people on suspected lists.  So expenses are going to rise dramatically but one cannot see however how anybody can say at the moment that one can skimp on security.