The images of masked men walking around with assault rifles including the brutal execution of a French policeman will fill many of us with terror and fear. The chilling words of Charlie Hebdo writer Laurent Léger on the phone to his friend ‘Call the police. It’s carnage, a bloodbath. Everyone is dead’ are chilling.

It is tempting at a time like this to seek security at all costs and those in power are usually all too willing to oblige. We ask to be kept safe and they are more than happy to play the paternalistic state. They give the caveat that we must give up certain freedoms in order to achieve the safety that we crave both for ourselves and our loved ones.

However, it is important that in the face of such terror, we do not give up any more of our freedoms than we already have over the past 14 years. Many bedrocks of western liberal democracy have been slowly chipped away since the start of the War on Terror. But these violations of our fundamental principles have bought neither absolute security nor stopped the attacks against us. Britain for instance has had to deal with terrorism of one sort of another since well before the July 7th bombings but after September 11th 2001, the number of rights we in the west have compromised in the hope of some delusional belief that there is such a thing as absolute security has been too high.

Whether it is unfettered spying by the NSA or GCHQ, detention without charge or without trial, it is imperative that the principles that keep us a fair and free society are upheld. We should not accept additional powers for intelligence and security services. It is incumbent upon Francois Hollande and other European leaders including us in the UK not to give in to the temptation of sacrificing the values of liberal democracy in the face of these threats.

The only prudent principled response to this tragedy is to not cower before the intimidation and barbaric violence of fascists neither by compromising freedom of expression by censoring the cartoons nor by rolling back bedrocks of democratic society. We have seen how in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans stood by and watched as the ironically named Patriot Act was passed with little controversy. Since then, Americans have accepted the torture, warrantless phone tapping and bulk collection of data of completely innocent people. It remains to be seen to what extent Britain’s intelligence services were complicit in these crimes.

Citizens within a democracy have the right to not be detained without trial and the right to not be under surveillance without a warrant from a judge. The fact that this even has to be said shows how far we have come and how much we have been prepared to give up since this all began. The erosion of civil liberties may continue unabated. Our willingness to give up our most basic rights has gone so far in the West that GCHQ is now brazen enough to say that privacy was never “an absolute right”. This all completely ignores the fact that the NSA’s dragnet surveillance “had no discernible impact” on preventing acts of terrorism in the United States. This is all to forget that the Fourth Amendment is specifically supposed to protect citizens against general warrantless searches.

For an appropriate response to terror, Hollande must look closer to home. After the Utøya island massacre in Norway, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said “The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation”. Norway did not respond to the attack with knee-jerk attacks on civil liberties, but instead doubled down on their principles of freedom and democracy.

The press should neither censor the cartoons which caused the controversy nor shy away from printing them. At the same time, we should not accept attempts to further curtail our own freedoms from institutions who already appear beyond the power of the democratic will of the people.

With MI5, Boris Johnson and the Prime Minister now calling for more powers, it is important now more than ever that the defenders of liberty make their stand. We should look in horror when a man who may one day seek the office of the Prime Minister says something like “I’m not interested in this civil liberties stuff. If they’re a threat, I want their emails and calls listened to” without realising how many people who are not a threat would also have their phone calls and emails listened to.

Totalitarianism comes in many different forms including Islamic fundamentalism and it should be opposed in whatever form that it takes. The cartoonists were exercising their democratic right through the powerful medium of satire and that right must be defended. However, we should not be convinced that we must also give up what makes us a free society.

* Zaheer Rayasat is a communications assistant for Conscience: Taxes for Peace Not War