While I generally agree with the gist of your things, neither body count nor Israel is a good subject in any of these discussions.

Would you say polio vaccines in e.g. Canada are useless because there are zero polio cases in Canada and have been for years?

The main claim of governments while making those rules is (generally) the same one behind vaccinations: "If we didn't spend all that money / curtail all that freedom / record all that communications - there would have been many casualties", and it is this argument that should be addressed.

According to [0], The NSA was unable to point at a single success. If they did have any, it is too sensitive to share, or they would have paraded it already - but either way, the count is surely ridiculously small for the price paid. AFAIK, Canadian and British intelligence has equally abysmal [public] record.

But Israel is different:

> For example, Israeli civilian deaths from any mortar attack from Gaza (let's assume 100% terrorism) in the past 14 years? 30.

This is the wrong number to look at, but let's look at it anyway, because the discussion is relevant:

The reason this count is so low is because Israel has spent so much effort making it that low, continuously since inception. e.g. Israeli building code requires a bomb shelter as part of every single building (older code), a bomb proof core (last 25 years) and additionally public bomb shelters; That's been going on for 70 years now. The most recent "Iron Dome" system uses $50,000-$100,000 rockets to target $500-$1,000 incoming rockets (each with rather small potential - say, to kill 10 people -- but of which there were 5,000-10,000 launched at Israel over 2014)

What would the death toll have been if Israel did not have these measures in place? Arguably 10-50 times higher; this is much less of a hypothetical discussion as the rockets were actually launched. But that's irrelevant to the C-51 discussion, I think; what is relevant is that when Israelis discuss these matters, they tend do disagree on their cost-benefit estimation (It cost us this-and-this-liberty, but it saved us this-many-lives, but it cost the palestinians that-many-lives and thus our humanity, but ....) and many actually object to e.g. Iron Dome. But there's mostly factual data to consider and debate. That is missing from the debate in other countries.

The number that does matter in this kind of discussion, I think is from [1] - which is over 600 casualties between 2000 to 2014. Israel actually had a serious suicide bombing problem back in the early 2000s, averaging about one deadly attack per week. It was, effectively, solved by 2006, and you are welcome to reach your own conclusion about how this was solved (HN is probably the wrong place for this discussion ....). However, I will say this: I'm not familiar with anyone who claims that this was solved by eroding the rights and privacy of the Israeli public -- which for some reason appears to be the preferred solution in just about every country (would probably have been in Israel as well if there was anything left to erode ...)

It's almost as if all those domestic spying bills actually have more sinister objectives. But we should all trust our governments to do the right things. /s

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/nsa-bul...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_att...