Patriot Act Riot Act
By Montag | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Legislation, The War On Terrorism[Follow up to this from the other day.]
The House voted to renew the Patriot Act, including renewing the “library clause” for ten years. The Senate will take up similar legislation in the fall. Pelosi sums it up well:
“The bill before us fails to assure accountability,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Today, we are deciding whether the government will be accountable to the people, to the Congress and to the courts for the exercise of its power.”
Republicans said there had been no documented instances of civil liberty abuses since the act was originally passed in 2001.
How is the response a valid argument? Under the Act, the feds don’t have to tell someone when they have performed a ‘sneak and peak’ and librarians and book stores are forbidden to tell anybody when someone’s records are requested. So how can someone complain that their civil liberties have been violated if they don’t know about it?
Even so, we can accept the assumption that there haven’t been any abuses of these powers… yet. This fact would tell us nothing about what will happen in the future. The potential for abuse remains. The forefathers were extremely wary of giving government any sort of power that could be abused, especially over the peoples liberty. Why are we moving away from this concept?
Reuters: House reauthorizes USA Patriot Act
In Other Rolling-Back-the-Fourth-Amendment News:
New York City will begin making random checks of bags and backpacks at subway stations, commuter railways and on buses, officials announced today in the wake of a second wave of bombings on the London transit system. The checks will begin on Friday morning.
Boston is considering doing the same thing.
New York Times: In New Security Move, New York Police to Search Commuters’ Bags
Terrorism is frightening, and news of an attack is always unsettling. The terrorists mean it to be. But realistically, attacks are so rare here that the fear is an unreasonable one, at least as a practical matter. The danger certainly doesn’t rise to a level that warrants the subjugation of our basic rights.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Legislation, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 22nd, 2005 at 8:38 am
Maybe I’m a bad American, but I confess the indignation just isn’t there over this one. What can you check out of a public library, or buy at a Borders, these days that’s so incendiary it would get you in trouble with the law?
And maybe it’s the Internet, but I always assume something’s tracking my purchases and my reading habits. Hell, it predates the Internet. My ex-wife and I had a miscarriage after we had signed up for a pre-baby program for first-time parents. Months after the miscarriage a phone call came, a sales pitch for a diaper service. I figured out it was just about the time the baby would have been born. Apparently, the HMO sold the mailing list from that first-baby program to all sorts of marketers. We were on it and it was too late to get off. Phone calls and mailings arrived at intervals like chapters in a child development book: Coupons for baby food, “Now that your child is ready to walk,” potty training guides, “Ranger Rick” magazine. Later the “Weekly Reader.”
If Yahoo can do it to make a buck, I’m not sure I totally object to the government doing it to save my life.
We’ve been moving away from it almost from the start. Such entrenched institutions as compulsory public education, collective bargaining, and the income tax were never part of their conception for America.
Beware: that’s the kind of statement that can come back to bite you, like saying, “We fight them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them on the streets of London.”
I dunno. I can’t get into a ball game or a department store without someone checking into my bag first. Hell, they confiscated a goddamn cheesesteak from my friend on his way into Veterans Stadium once. Why should the New York subway be any different?
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:33 am
A few independent thoughts:
I can see why the FBI would want to key on very particular books. A typical terrorist profile might lead to a short list of books such that, if you see, say, three of them on a guy’s checkout list, and it’s not some professor doing research, you might want to talk to him, or surveil him at the very least.
Given that, I can see why they’d want it kept secret, too. Honestly, it’d be stupid for the FBI to disclose this short list of books.
OTOH, it’d be stupid for an aspiring terrorist to check out any book discussing criminal activity in great detail (as opposed to books covering it more generically, such as a history book about Al Capone, for example). And anyone doing bona fide research would probably want to make that fact public, so there’s no paranoia.
Meanwhile. Flip it around. Another terrorist attack occurs here. Investigation reveals the perpetrator had been checking out numerous books from a number of public libraries dealing with bomb construction, lock construction (and picking), and was requesting a number of blueprints of buildings in the vicinity of the attack. People would be clamoring, “why in hell didn’t they find this guy?? A simple search of library records would have made him stick out like a sore thumb!”
Meanwhile. My libertarian side bristles every time I hear the argument that “no abuses of this law have been reported”. I don’t care if the ACLU took over the FBI building, looked at every piece of paper they produced, and reported that the FBI was indeed doing everything in a proper and exemplary fashion. The fact is, even if this FBI might be completely trustworthy to implement the Patriot Act without abusing it, future FBIs wouldn’t necessarily do so as well.
This is not to say we should repeal the Patriot Act (or let it expire – and btw, I’m glad this particular Act at least has an expiration date; that was a sound idea), and then go home confident that our government has been kept in check. We should all remember the underpinnings of our legal system. Without a Patriot Act, the only things keeping the FBI from secretly polling library records anyway is the fact that if they’re caught, there’s a strong case to send the perps to jail, and more importantly, the culture promulgated through the FBI agents themselves, which stresses a respect for the law.
Respect for the law applies to many, many more things than just a Patriot Act.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:13 am
The AWB had a sunset date. It never demonstrably reduced crime. When people recognized that it wasn’t accomplishing its proponents’ stated purpose, it appropriately faded away.
Unlike the right to keep and bear arms, I’m not aware of an outright provision in the Constitution for privacy with respect to the use of public facilities like a library or (certainly) with respect to the use of private facilities (commuter trains, airlines, bus lines, etc.). That said, the SCotUS has discovered several rights and federal authorities that were apparently written into the margins of the Constitution, so I’m sure some will argue with this.
The point is that because of the time limit and the relatively non-invasive nature of monitoring patterns with respect to certain books, it’s really kind of tough for me to get excited about this aspect of the Act, and precedent set with the AWB shows that such a law can and will expire if it’s deemed no longer useful.
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:29 pm
I have a hard time getting upset about this too, the Patriot Act isn’t any more than the RICO stuff with the words ‘and terrorists too’. I certainly don’t rememeber a big bruhaha over that.
Surely if we can use it against organized crime figures, we can also use it against terrorist organizations…
August 7th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Good job.
August 7th, 2006 at 2:51 am
[...] Patriot Act Riot ActDonklephant - 2 hours ago… mailings arrived at intervals like chapters in a child development book: Coupons for baby … I can t get into a ball game or a department store without someone … [...]
September 30th, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Its actually very complicated and though to say the right thing…