Ever since I attended a conference on homeland security in Paris four years ago, I’ve been fascinated by how little the French, Italians, Germans and other continentals worry about violations of their civil rights by their spy agencies.

In fact, outside the United Kingdom, which invented civil liberties with the Magna Carta 993 years ago last Sunday, ordinary Europeans couldn’t care less about wiretapping, national ID cards, preventive detention and police spies in mosques, all of which have millions of Americans, not to mention the ACLU and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, up in arms.

And even in London, only the newspapers and a few liberal politicians made a fuss over the Labour government’s decision, ratified by the House of Commons on June 11, to extend to 42 days the police’s authority to hold terrorism suspects without charge.

“British liberties have been eroded under Labour. Few seem to mind much,” the Economist headlined one story on the row this week.

“Liberals have long lamented that, despite much stirring rhetoric about the mother of parliaments and Magna Carta, modern Britons have little real interest in their hard-won liberties,” the magazine maintained. “On June 17th, as Gordon Brown gave a speech on the subject, that pessimism seemed confirmed when one rapt listener fell asleep in the middle of the prime minister’s oration.”

That goes double on the continent.

Over coffee after the Paris conference, a top French security official told me nobody questioned his right to summon an imam and tell him to cool the Islamist rhetoric or he’d be giving future sermons in Algeria.

Nor did the official need any special permission to put informants in the mosques, he said with a classic Gallic shrug.

Last week I queried another top French security official, Jean-Louis Bruguière, the leading magistrate in charge of investigating terrorist activities from 2004 to 2007, about it.

In three years Bruguière had ordered the arrest more than 500 suspects, some in cooperation with U.S. authorities, according to reports.

“All the security activities lie in the framework of the law,” Bruguière told me by e-mail. “And there is no public dispute about domestic spying by French security agencies.

“The fight against terrorism is viewed as a priority,” he continued, “and we [insist on] a suitable balance between safeguarding civil liberties and the protection of society.”

Furthermore, he added, “Our legal system appears to be more efficient than the U.S. one and we don’t have extraordinary special legal provisions to cope with the terrorist threat.”

The same goes for Italy.

“In Italy, the public isn’t bothered much by the strong anti-terrorism measures carried out by the intelligence agencies,” says Leo Sisti, a top investigative reporter at L’Espresso magazine.

Prominent civil liberties groups don’t even exist in Rome.

“Occasionally, there are panels on these matters organized by university professors, historians, legal experts, judges or journalists,” Sisti said. “But it’s like talking to the winds.”

The public’s indifference even extends to U.S. covert activities in Italy, where 26 Americans, all but one CIA operatives, are being tried in absentia on charges they kidnapped an al Qaeda suspect in Milan in 2003.

Sisti said that when testimony in the trial recently revealed that the CIA had placed a spy inside the Milan mosque attended by the suspect, Abu Omar, there was “no reaction.”

“Sometimes jurists or editorialists try to stir up interest in such legal matters,” he said, “but there are only a few.”

As in France, Italian police keep tabs on the mosques with bugs and informants, generally an anathema here, where the struggle for religious freedom and the separation of church and state are part of the national political fabric.

And Armando Spataro, the Italian prosecutor in the CIA case, told me the public doesn’t worry much about its rights.

“They’d rather watch the football championships!” he said by e-mail on Friday.

Still, he said in reference to the U.K’s new 42-day detentions, “I can’t imagine the Italian Parliament passing a law like that. Or at least I hope!”

Within 24 hours, he said, Italian police must hand over the results of interrogations to prosecutors and defense attorneys. After another 24 hours, prosecutors and magistrates can release a prisoner for lack of evidence.

In Milan alone, Spataro has successfully prosecuted dozens of al Qaeda suspects, and long before that, members of the Red Brigade leftist terrorist group. He’s also put top mafiosi in jail.

“Italian intelligence agents are allowed to perform [warrantless] wiretaps under a special law passed on July 2005 after the London bombings, Spataro said. But “they may do this only for precautionary measures and security reasons. In any case, they must apply to the prosecutors to be entitled to do wiretaps. But they are never allowed to run investigations, [which is] a matter in prosecutors’ hands.”

Italian intelligence has never undertaken a kidnapping, or “extraordinary rendition,” in a terrorism case, Spataro said.

“Absolutely not, not to my knowledge,” he said.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, recently returned to power, wants to strengthen wiretap authority. He has also proposed three-year jail terms for journalists “who publish excerpts of intercepts or parts of arrest warrants related to any investigation,” Sisti said, adding that the public didn’t seem concerned about it.

In Germany, the government has come under fire for allegedly assisting the CIA in secret rendition flights.

Because of its Nazi history, Germany also has strict limitations on police powers.

But the present-day German public is largely indifferent to the issue, says a European journalist who has been assigned to the United States for more than a dozen years.

It’s likely because Germans, like the French and Italians, ran out of patience with domestic terror groups years ago.

“Germans were traumatized by the Bader-Meinhof Gang,” which carried out airline hijackings and kidnappings in the 1970s and ’80s, said the journalist, who asked not to be quoted because he represents an international news organization.

“Europeans don’t act so allergically” to new anti-terrorism measures, he said, such as proposals here for a national identification card. Most Europeans have always carried them.

“There is a more highly developed sense [in the United States] of what freedom means,” he said.

The Supreme Count’s recent decision, on a 5-4 vote, to give Guantanamo detainees rights to petition civilian courts for a hearing, known as habeas corpus, sparked an uproar — hailed by liberals, denounced by conservatives.

That would never happen in France.

“We don’t have ‘habeas corpus’ because the investigative magistrate (juge d’ Instruction) is present from the very beginning of the investigation,” Bruguière told me. “Moreover, in the French judicial system, the judge is allowed to conduct wiretaps in order to gather pieces of evidence. For that purpose he issues a special warrant.”

He added, “French security agencies are free to carry out secret operations, except those which would . . . infringe civil liberties or human rights.”

Not always. In July 1985, French secret agents sunk the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship interfering in French nuclear tests in the Pacific, at its berth in Aukland, New Zealand. A photographer on board drowned.

That’s unimaginable here, even in the stress of the “war on terror.” And American officials caught ordering something like that would almost certainly go to jail.

Only two lowly French agents involved in the Rainbow Warrior attack were arrested and convicted, in New Zealand. French officials who ordered the attack went free.

But lesser measures, in particular the torture of al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody, have sparked outrage here, which will only grow more intense with the march toward November’s elections.

Good or bad?

I report, you decide.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.