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Increasing numbers of ‘terror suspects’ are being arrested on the basis of online and CCTV surveillance data. Authorities claim they act in the public interest, but does this intense surveillance keep us safer?

Update: I posted this yesterday. This morning I woke up still waist-deep in a dream. I’ve been dreaming more vividly in the last year or so than I think I ever have before in my life, and loving every second of it — actively looking forward to dreaming when I go to bed — in no small part because of the uncharacteristically (for me) frequent and rousing sexy dreamtimes.

But this dream this morning wasn’t just very sexy, at least in the third act. Though it early-on involved a lot of semirandom JamesBonding, with action sequences and exotic locales and ladies aplenty, the final segment of went like so: it had Been Revealed To Me By Those In The Know that Facebook and other social media sites that encourage you to frame and tag faces in photos with people’s names were feeding that data into government databases. You know, For Nefarious Purposes.

To the rescue! Sadly, swinging into action to right this wrong didn’t end up being all that exciting, though. Sitting in front of a computer is something I do too much of when I’m awake. In the dream, I heroically reopened my long-dormant Facebook account and started tagging faces with random, amusing-to-me names. The high point, just before I woke up, was tagging a picture of Stephen Harper with the name Whoopi Goldberg.

Small victories, I guess.