The Patriot Act became law ten years ago last October.
It passed the Senate by an overwhelming vote of 96-1, with only Sen. Russ Feingold in dissent.
He observed that the;
"founders who wrote our Constitution exercised that vigilance even though they had recently fought & won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable & easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers & an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace."
He traced the dark periods in our history when civil liberties took a back seat to what appeared to be the legitimate exigencies of war. The Alien & Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the blacklisting of alleged communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era & the surveillance & harassment of antiwar protesters, including Martin Luther King.
Feingold quoted Justice Arthur Goldberg:
"It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which will inhibit governmental action. The Constitution is a law for rulers & people, equally in war & peace, & covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, & under all circumstances."
Feingold observed that:
"Even as America addresses the demanding security challenges before us, we must strive mightily also to guard our values and basic rights & we must guard against racism & ethnic discrimination against people of Arab origin & those who are Muslim."
"There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover & arrest more terrorists."
"But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. That would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight & die. In short, that would not be America."
Seeing so clearly into the future, he warned that,
"In the wake of these terrible events, our government has been given vast new powers, & they may fall most heavily on a minority of our population who already feel particularly acutely the pain of this disaster."
Feingold reminded us what Louis Brandeis foresaw when he wrote:
"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, & by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?"
Ten years later, we still do not know the extent of surveillance activities conducted by the NSA that under Attorney General John Ashcroft that so alarmed even officials at the Bush Justice Department that they nearly resigned en masse.
The ACLU reveals that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA tapped directly into major American communications centers, with their cooperation, to access billions of American emails & phone calls which the agency then combed through for people it deemed "suspicious."
Although this brazenly violated the law, Congress responded with a blank check, legalizing their eavesdropping activities & authorizing more.
When the ACLU went to court to challenge the legality of this, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit.
We now live in what the ACLU calls a post-9/11 national surveillance society.
When individuals cannot object to secret governmental activities which are concealed from them, checks & balances are particularly critical.
The right to privacy is founded on the fundamental principle that our government must have actual suspicion that someone is breaking the law before monitoring Americans' daily activities.
Exploiting the fear that followed 9/11, Bush asked Congress to loosen critical constraints on surveillance under which the intelligence & law enforcement agencies had long operated without ever demonstrating that those constraints contributed to the attacks.
The ACLU points out that the Patriot Act expanded the FBI's authority to use National Security Letters to secretly demand telecommunications, credit & financial information from private companies not just relating to suspected terrorists, but to anyone they deem "relevant" to an investigation.
When Congress was debating whether to extend expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales brazenly testified that there were no "substantiated" allegations of FBI abuse.
But because the FBI exercised its powers in complete secrecy, Congress had no way to verify these claims, so it dutifully reauthorized the Act.
And guess what?
The Department of Justice inspector general released five audit reports, "substantiating" thousands of violations of law and policy, just as Feingold had predicted.
Yet in the face of such uncontested evidence of the FBI's widespread misuse of its authority, did Congress repeal any of these powers?
No.
Instead, they have repeatedly reauthorized all expiring provisions without narrowing them in any way.
In 2002, we learned about the Total Information Awareness program, under which the Pentagon was planning to gather information from thousands of databases worldwide, covering every facet of the everyday lives of ordinary Americans, to create one giant database that military & law enforcement officials could easily search for "suspect activity".
After the press exposed TIA, Congress shut down the program.
Or so we thought.
Instead, they allowed key data-mining elements of TIA to be perpetuated under the secret umbrella of the NSA, where we cannot monitor their use.
Once the government collects data about alleged "suspicious" activity, it can retain it for a lifetime, even when the information shows the person is not a threat.
Each of the over 300 million cell phones in the US reveals its location whenever it is turned on, & the Justice Department is aggressively using them to monitor people's location.
From 2003 to 2005, the FBI made close to 150,000 NSL requests.
But the FBI documented only one conviction in a terrorism case using data from NSLs during the three-year period, & found no instance in which an NSL request helped to prevent an actual terrorist plot.
There is no evidence of additional plots foiled or arrests made as a result of these programs.
Post-9/11, the government has spied on racial and religious minority groups & community organizations, college groups, military reservists calling home to their families, journalists, aid workers, political activists & many others.
The ACLU warns that it is;
"not too late to strengthen our laws, to take back our data, & to ensure that government surveillance is conducted under effective & reasonable constraints, subject to meaningful oversight."
But the ACLU reminds us that, "we have to speak up now, before our surveillance society is irrevocably entrenched & we find that we have permanently sacrificed our essential values."
http://www.truth-out.org/...