I Fought the Law and the Law Spun

The Justice Department has been working hard to assuage public concerns about the scope of intrusive powers granted to law enforcement by the PATRIOT Act. The only problem, according to the ACLU, is that they have to lie to do it. You can download their full report here.

Comments

[martin]

How sad, yet how indicative!
At the moment of this writing, 57 comments have been posted regarding music file sharing, and those mainly deal with the legality of it rather than with the obvious fact that a mamber of Congress is deep in an industry's pocket. And here we're dealing with fundamental and very important civil liberties issues and there has been one (1) solitary comment.
People get what they deserve from their government!

[Lefty]

Yeah, and it was a pretty lame comment, too.

[jacob dreyer]

how sad, yet how indicative! some guys have so little to do in their free time that they post at blogs tsktsking the fact that the blog responses aren't balanced as he'd like them to be and taking this inconsequential piece of evidence as proof that "People get what they deserve from their government!"

is posting a comment at a blog a vote?

[Chad P.]

"The only problem, according to the ACLU, is that they have to lie to do it."

The only problem with *that*, according to sources like http://volokh.com/2003_07_06_volokh_archive.html,
is that the *ACLU* may be lying.

Not wanting to open the can of worms that is the Patriot Act itself, I'd like to point out that this "debate", woefully uninformed as it is, is the reason I subscribed to REASON in the first place. There exist tons of misinformation and hysteria about the Patriot Act all over the place. I'd expect a magazine named REASON to focus its writers on digging in and producing an objective, detailed, sober, hysteria-free analysis of what *really* is or is not included in the Patriot Act - what is new, what is simply codification of previous common practices, what are realistically the components of the act that pose the greatest real potential harm to "free minds and free markets", what would be the effects of emerging and possible technologies, etc.

I remember a few months ago getting in the mail the REASON issue with John Ashcroft pictured on the cover, and I thought "wow, finally, the team at REASON are going to cut through the overwrought crap and give us a hard-core, responsible analysis of what the Patriot Act entails." But, nope, instead we got a hack job, hit-job on Ashcroft, consisting of anecdotes about how he doesn't dance or that he flew an airplane as a boy. It was like reading an Entertainment Weekly feature about a political figure. How disappointing.

Anyone know where one could find a resonsible, non-agenda driven analyis on the Patriot Act? (And I *don't* mean the ACLU, their hilarious "send us money right this second or John Ashcroft will kill us all" missives hit my mailbox, and then the trash, like clockwork.)

[Julian Sanchez]

Chad-
Fair enough. Give me a week.

[Lefty]

Slick Willie, Slick W, Slick John, Slick Dick...

Hmm.