We are gathered here today to discuss the state of liberty in the United Kingdom—and the purported threat to those liberties from measures to promote the nation’s security, especially against terrorism.

Yet if people in the United Kingdom hesitate to speak or write freely—if British universities are less open than formerly to novel or dissenting ideas; if British thinkers, writers, and artists dread economic reprisal and even physical violence more than they did two or three decades ago—the security measures adopted by the British government to protect this country against terrorism rank very, very low among the things they have to fear.

And if we consider other liberties also cherished by free people—the right to buy and sell, to employ and be employed; the right to enjoy property; the right of a nation’s citizens to be free of punishment by their nation except in accordance with positive law applied with due process—then the whole topic of counterterrorism tumbles even lower, far behind, for example, anti-discrimination or environmental protection.

This resolution derives its emotional force from a broad sentiment among British people that they are more monitored and controlled than were their parents and grandparents, more harried and bullied. These feelings are amply justified. Not since the age of the village stocks and the ducking stool have people been as surveilled by their neighbors—or as exposed to public humiliation. A woman with a few dozen Twitter followers texts a cynical comment before her plane lifts off; she lands to discover herself an international pariah.

So, yes—there are good reasons to feel exposed and vulnerable. Troublingly, however, this resolution exploits those feelings, rather than responding to them.

It’s not the State that is our Panopticon. It’s Facebook.

Suppose British society were to unravel the security measures condemned by this resolution. Would people be freer to tell jokes? Would they be better protected against mobs seeking to impose their definition of social justice by force? Would cartoonists and writers be one degree safer from the threat of censorship by murder?

The answer in every case is: actually, even less so. It’s precisely to protect the rights of cartoonists like those at Charlie Hebdo that governments across the Western world deploy surveillance against potential terrorist attackers.

The proponents of this resolution have impressed us all with their passion and principle. Their good faith is manifest. Yet this resolution itself is a trick. There are exceptions, but it’s a reliable general rule that those in British society most hostile to counterterrorism policing are most sympathetic to—or at least indulgent of—those other forms of policing that most immediately and dangerously invade traditional British freedoms. In some cases, in fact, those who object to counterterrorism policing object precisely because the counterterrorists are working to prevent them from attacking the rights of others: the right to speak freely, the right to deny religious dogma, even the mundane right to sell a bowl of breakfast cereal without having one’s restaurant trashed.