PATRIOT Watch

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has a sharp, balanced column on The PATRIOT Act that's well worth reading in its entirety. Snippets:

While some portions of the Patriot Act are truly radical, others are benign. Parts of the act formalize and regulate government conduct that was unregulated?and potentially even more terrifying?before. Other parts clearly expand government powers and allow it to spy on ordinary citizens in new ways. But what is most frightening about the act is exacerbated by the lack of government candor in describing its implementation. FOIA requests have been half-answered, queries from the judiciary committee are blown off or classified. In the absence of any knowledge about how the act has been used, one isn't wrong to fear it in the abstract?to worry about its potential, since that is all we can know.
…

When asked by the House Committee on the Judiciary to detail whether and how many times Section 215 has been used "to obtain records from a public library, bookstore, or newspaper," the DOJ said it would send classified answers to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The judiciary committee had what it called "reasonable limited access" to those responses, and it reported in October 2002 that its review had "not given any rise to concern that the authority is being misused or abused."

Wanting to learn more, the ACLU and some other civil rights groups filed a FOIA request, arguing that the DOJ was classifying its answers unnecessarily. But this May, a federal judge in U.S. district court in Washington ruled that the DOJ had the right to keep the specifics hush-hush under FOIA's national security exemption. The next day, at a judiciary committee hearing, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh did throw a bone to librarians, noting that in "an informal survey of the field offices," Justice learned "that libraries have been contacted approximately 50 times, based on articulable suspicion or voluntary calls from librarians regarding suspicious activity." He did not give specifics on searches of any other establishments.
…

[Section] 215 does extend FBI power to conduct essentially warrantless records searches, especially on people who are not themselves terror suspects, with little or no judicial oversight. The government sees this as an incremental change in the law, but the lack of meaningful judicial oversight and expanded scope of possible suspects is pretty dramatic.

The whole thing, apparently the first of a series on the act, is here.

Comments

[erf]

Not bad, though the incremental nature of the act in parts seems to be taken as a legitimate excuse for the incursions on liberty. Liberty is almost always taken in small bits, bits that add up under successive appeals that the government be able to do more, because the war on terror won’t be won in 2005, or 2010, or 2030.

[Andrew Lynch]

Rick Barton,

You are consistent. Thanks to your suggestion that we nag our representatives, I’ve been nagging mine about Patriot for a couple of months. They (or their interns) have even written back…to tell me that they are evaluating the balance between personal liberties and national security, which is a politician’s way of not offending the constituency while leaving all doors open for AC/DC decisions. I look forward to the day when my Senator can write to me and say, “Hey, brother, I hear you. I wouldn’t support that piece of crap legislation if you paid me.”

[Rick Barton]

From the article:
“The difference they (the DOJ) don’t acknowledge is that investigators may now do so (subpoena private records) secretly, and these orders cannot be contested in court. While the new DOJ Web site asserts that searches under 215 are limited to “business records,” the act on its face allows scrutiny of “any tangible thing” including books, records, papers, documents, and anything else. The site also says U.S. citizens may not be subject to search, but the act does not differentiate. How can it, when a library or doctor’s office is simply asked to produce a list of names?”

Even if you trust the Bushies totally, imagine a Clinton or a Nixon with these powers. Unless we roll back the Patriot Act, is it not probable that the government will use these powers to attack political dissent? If you love liberty please contact your congress person and senatores and tell them to take these and other freedom threatening provisions out of Patriot and tell them not to enact any new “enhancement” of the act that the DOJ is advocating.

[Rick Barton]

Andrew Lynch,

Good Job! Some of these things get decided by just one or two votes, so your personal prodding could wind up being responsible for the preservation of our liberty. One person can indeed make a difference and when whats at stake is our very freedom, we should all try. Tell your friends and family to help as well, politicians are “go with the flow” types by nesessity, so we must let them know there is a pro-liberty vote out there.

[Anonymous]

Forget it, Rick. Your name’s probably in the NCIC database now as a potential enemy of the state.

[Thorley Winston]

Although I wouldn’t go so far as to call her column “balanced” (unless you consider investigative reports of the “should you be afraid of what’s in your kid’s cereal” caliber to be “balanced”) but she’s head and shoulders above the usual hyberbolid screed we’ve seen written about the Patriot Act.

I guess my only question is, how come you don’t have somebody like that writing your articles about the Patriot Act?