This week, videotapes of the interrogation of Canadian citizen and child soldier Omar Khadr will be released to the public, thanks to Canadian courts:

Lately, clandestine activities provided for in 1984’s CSIS Act have been running into a competing and concurrent law. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms bestows some of the world’s highest civil-liberties protections to Canadian citizens, meaning that just as CSIS is getting more ambitious about chasing alleged terrorists at home and abroad, it is finding it is getting a lot harder to keep national security secrets.

“This has got to be the decade that the spies came in from the cold,” Jim Judd, CSIS’s director said in a speech in April. “Whether voluntarily, or kicking and screaming.”

He spoke of a world where the “judicialization” of intelligence practices and aggressive reporting threatens the very idea of state secrecy.

For the moment, the rule of law is relatively healthy in this country.