The Patriot Act

If September 11, 2001 has taught me anything, it's taught me that the liberties that we all take for granted can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.

After 9/11, we were all shell-shocked and horrified. John Ashcroft and others came up with The Patriot Act, to make us all feel safer and to preserve our way of life. It's not clear to me that the Patriot Act has done either. America changed after 9/11. We are less trusting now. That distrust is the very blood the Patriot Act lives on.

The Patriot Act says that for us to feel safer, we must be willing to give up some of the freedoms and due process that we have come to expect. Constitutional rights are conveniently ignored for the greater good of the country (didn't we go through this once before? ...something called McCarthyism?).

A few items from the Patriot Act:
Sec. 206: Allows a wiretap to be granted against an individual, instead of a particular phone. Previously, for example, if a person had a cell phone, a home phone, and an office phone, the government had to obtain separate warrants on each.

Sec. 206: Allows a wiretap to be granted against an individual, instead of a particular phone. Previously, for example, if a person had a cell phone, a home phone, and an office phone, the government had to obtain separate warrants on each.

Sec. 209: Permits the seizure of voice-mail messages under a warrant.

Sec. 213: Allows FBI agents to conduct a search of a business or a place without notifying the owner that the search has been conducted until later.

Section 412 extends the power of the attorney general to detain foreigners. The attorney general can order the detention of any foreigners if he certifies that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" involvement in terrorism or activity that poses a danger to national security. He does not need to explain his reasoning or show evidence.

Sec. 416: Directs the Attorney General to implement fully and expand the foreign student monitoring program to include other approved educational institutions like air flight, language training, or vocational schools.

Gives the FBI expanded powers of access to educational and business records in investigations of suspected terrorist activity. Under the act, records of the books and other materials you borrow from this library may be obtained by federal agents. The act prohibits library workers from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you.

Sec. 814: allows wiretaps for suspected violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including anyone suspected of "exceeding the authority" of a computer used in interstate commerce, causing over $5000 worth of combined damage. Critics state that the law expands the powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on Americans or foreign persons in the US (and those who communicate with them), and that it expands the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, from the situations where the suspicion that the person is the agent of a foreign government is "the" purpose of the surveillance to any time that this is "a significant purpose" of the surveillance.

Critics state that the law allows increased information sharing between domestic law enforcement and intelligence, repealing some of the barriers put up in the 1970s after the discovery that the FBI and CIA had been conducting joint investigations on over half a million Americans during the McCarthy era and afterwards, including Martin Luther King Jr. It allows wiretap results and grand jury information and other information collected in a criminal case to be disclosed to the intelligence agencies when the information constitutes foreign intelligence or foreign intelligence information, the latter being a broad new category created by this law.

Feel safer now?