Regarding the Nov. 20 article "Security cameras: Ensuring safety or invading privacy?": Here we go again with "I have nothing to hide, so why should I not give up some privacy for security." This way of naive thinking is worrisome and wrong. The issue is not "security versus privacy" but rather "liberty versus control." Tyranny, either by a physical attack or by constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.

If we are constantly observed, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment and criticism of our own unique being. Patterns we leave behind can be used in years to implicate us by whatever authority has then become interested in our once-private and innocent acts. Anyone who easily accepts the government's or a private company's surveillance and data collection requirements for our "safety" has never thought about the possibility of a corrupt government that will come into power some years from now, or the misuse of the collected data by the companies that we trusted to protect us.

We are not purposefully hiding anything once we retract to our private places for reflection or conversation. We do nothing wrong when we use the Internet to communicate with our friends, or write letters to secret lovers. Privacy is one of our essential human needs. If everything becomes observable and recordable, then we lose our individuality because of fear that being different will one day incriminate us.

Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we need to protect our privacy even when we have nothing to hide. It is our choice to live in a free community or face life similar to that in former East Germany or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The current security and terrorism paranoia present a test case for the very foundation of each democratic state: the liberty of its people.

dieter metzger