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Part Of The Patriot Act Shot Down
jtwJGuevara writes "In a victory today for the ACLU, (and many Slashdotters I presume) the section of the Patriot Act which gives power to the FBI to demand confidential financial records from companies as part of terrorist investigations has been ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. District Judge. Victor Marreo, the District Judge who made this ruling, states that the provision of the Patriot Act in question 'effectively bars or substantially deters any judicial challenge.'"
Sounds like a defense of CORPORATIONS rights, which are more and more behind the scenes, creating laws and running the country. We have separation of church and state - we need separation of business and state as well.
Under the provision, the FBI did not have to show a judge a compelling need for the records and it did not have to specify any process that would allow a recipient to fight the demand for confidential information.
Checks and balances is overrated anyway. I mean, those Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution several hundred years ago when there were no terrorists. Oh wait, didn't they act like terrorists against the British...?
I'd be willing to be that this one will see the Supreme Court. Hopefully they'll not overturn this extrordinarily wise decision.
I moderate Mr. Marreo +1 : Liberty.
Its an uphill battle against bureaucracy, against the thirst for more power and its fought by decent civil libertarians amidst others who are running the risk of being labeled as unpatriotic girly men by Fox news and the Republican party.
ACLU has been moderately successful in chipping away provisions of the Patriot Act, desperately trying to limit its broad sweeping powers acquired during the aftermath of Sept 11, when the notion of security drew a shadowy veil over our eyes and across measures of oversight and provided us with the promise of a secure land but taking away our freedom in its place. The people behind it were clever enough to threaten us with more attacks and a terrible outcome if these measures were not passed, but put nothing in place to provide oversight, nothing in place to limit its ever stretching arm, reaching out to our private lives.
Now, the Republican party is getting ready with "Patriot Act II" in response to the findings of the Sept 11 commission, but in stark contrast to what's required, has granted far greater power and reach to the security agencies while dramatically eroding constitutional protections and providing a fraction of added security.
Republicans now more than ever seem to be under the belief that they could throw any dissenting american in to prison and blow up anyone voicing their dissent outside the US and are on a collission course with the stark reality that while we may never die from a terrorist attack, we will surely feel the ever tightening grip of a police state.
Rapid Nirvana
That's interesting, could you explain why? I was under the impression that the lower courts order would be binding unless the supreme court chose to override it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"The terrorists have won", Ashcroft will croon...
Please remind me of all the Dems that voted against the patriot act.
Thanks in advance.
Music today is so uninspiring it would make Martin Luther King want to watch Friends. The patriotic act is merely protecting shitty music, shitty movies, and other contemporary shit designed to make money. Who cares.
This is the Patriot act; not the DMCA.
We have separation of church and state - we need separation of business and state as well.
... Now thats a good idea! We can call it Citizen Protection Act.
... i'm dreaming...
While we're at lets make a law that puts some accountability on those that write laws later found to be unconstitutional.
I think that George Tennet gave the most damning testimony against the PATRIOT Act during the 9/11 commission, and he didn't even realize it. In his closing arguments, he said that the US knew everything it needed to know to stop the 9/11 attacks, but everyone held a different piece of the puzzle but didn't want to share that piece with anyone else. The government doesn't need any more power to stop terrorism, they just need to get rid of the bureacracy, which is why this new intelligence office is total BS: they are trying to fight the problem of too much bureacracy with.....MORE bureacracy(yeah, I can't spell). Unfortunately both major political candidates think this the real way to reform intelligence......
Monstar L
Awww.... come on
You act as if the ACLU has an agenda that they are trying to disguise under the ploy of "Civil Liberties."
Oh, wait. They do.
Republicans now more than ever seem to be under the belief that they could throw any dissenting american in to prison and blow up anyone voicing their dissent outside the US and are on a collission course with the stark reality that while we may never die from a terrorist attack, we will surely feel the ever tightening grip of a police state.
You had something going there until this last bit of dribble.
I hardly think you can blame Republicans when 98 senators and 337 Representatives voted for the bill. Those senators of course included your beloved John Kerry.
They didn't even need the patriot act to do that - with a court order, they can get all the financial records that they need - and that's always been the case.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
It is nice to see someone point this out. School Vouchers allow for Choice!
It should be no surprise that the same people that always bitch and want to be Pro-Choice (the right to kill a child) are really anti-choice when it comes to selecting where to educate that child.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I don't see how the 2 issues contradict each other. Both viewpoints seem to adhere to the idea of separation of church and state. With regards to abortion, the ACLU believes the legality of abortion should not be threatened by an individual or groups religious beliefes interefering with the state's law making decisions. The same argument holds for the school voucher issue, just in reverse. The state's law making abilities should not favor a religious belief.
They're both consistent. Keep religion out of public legislation, whether it's laws that potentially support a religion (school vouchers) or laws that run afoul of some people's religious sensibilities (abortion.)
Like the old saying - you gave him an inch, he will ask for a foot, it does apply to both ways though.
I don't think this is a good explanation of why PATRIOT act is bad. I reject is because it violates the Popperian criterion of good law (not to be mistaken by the more famous Popperian criterion of what is and what isn't scientific). Popper said that it is reasonable to assume that sooner or later some rotten scoundrels will gain power. It's not important who they will be precisely, but whatever your politcal views might be you must agree that a likelihood of such event is rather high. So whatever law you want to have in you country, don't ask yourself the question "how this law can be used in good hands". Ask the question "how this law can be used when the filthiest, dirtest, stupidest bastards will rule my country (and sooner or later they probably will)". Only the law that cannot be used to anything wrong EVEN by the most vicious ruler is truly good. Now, PATRIOT act could maybe be a good idea in the hands of pure angels. Even if you think Bush and Cheney are as good as angels, you can't seriously think they will rule forever, can you? And just imagine what a malevolent ruler can do with this act...
I seriously doubt you're a lawyer, because no lawyer I know would be so reckless as to make this statement. It's just plain wrong, and I hope anyone reading this thread will remember how dangerous it is to get a legal education on Slashdot.
This judge's ruling is binding within his jurisdiction. That means it's a settled issue within that district. This will undoubtedly be appealed to an appellate court, and once it hits the appellate level, the appeals court will re-examine the conclusions of law. The conclusions of fact, though, are supreme and cannot be re-examined by any court unless they are "as offensive to the senses as a three day old mackerel". (For non-lawyers, yes, that is the legal standard used. The precedent in question is a funny read.)
Once the appellate court rules on it, the judgement is binding within the appellate court's entire jurisdiction. At this point, the law is effectively dead. Other appellate courts will refer to this first appellate court in their own decisions, and it's overwhelmingly likely all Federal circuits will come to the exact same decision.
The Supreme Court accepts less than one percent of the cases appealed to it from the appellate court level. The cases it accepts tends, overwhelmingly, to be cases which have been handled in different ways by different appellate courts (a rare occurrence), or cases which it feels to possess unusual relevance to Constitutional law.
Seriously, whenever I hear about any of the freedom-reducing provisions of the Patriot act, I can't help but ask myself, "What exactly do these people like about America? As for myself, I always felt very proud of our freedom, but these jokers keep taking it away bit by bit, and don't even appear to feel bad about it."
Bush calls the terrorists "freedom-haters", but ironically I see his administration as one of the biggest "freedom-reducers" in the past 20 years. Heck, under their own logic, by cutting our freedoms, aren't they giving the freedom-hating terrorists what they want?
Is having a free country hard? Yes. But as a country, don't we pride ourselves on doing the right thing, even if it's tough? I thought we did. Is there an alternative to the Patriot act that would preserve our safety and yet not place such restrictive burden on our freedom? I think there is, but it doesn't feel like we even tried looking for it.
P.S. Would the Patriot act have prevented 9/11? This is a guessing game, and it's hard to characterize such a giant bloated act, but most of the provisions under the Patriot act don't seem like they even begin to address the real problems that allowed 9/11 to happen. So ironically, we've given away a lot of freedom for a bunch of laws that wouldn't have made us safer.
I don't see how allowing a parent to make a choice as to how their kid is educated their their own money (which is, essentially what tax dollars are) constitutes an endorsement of religion. The parents are as free to choose an aethist setting as they are a Catholic setting. The argument just doesn't hold water, methinks.
The ACLU has a left-wing agenda, and it shines on through with inconsistencies such as this. (And before you say anything, know that I work with the ACLU on the Nevada Campaign to Defeat the PATRIOT Act. So there.)
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I'm not sure that I'm reading your post right...perhaps I'm just misunderstanding your logic. Could you elaborate on how this is an inconsistency?
It seems to me that the ACLU is saying something like "we oppose laws based on someone's dogmatic morality". They're also appear to take on a position along the lines of "we oppose government funding of religious education". To me, their message seems pretty consistent that they fear the government imposing religion of any kind, in any way, and take a "slippery slope" attitude.
What does strike me as strange in the second link that you pointed out may have everything to do with my perceptions. I always imagined the ACLU as a pretty objective Libertarian organization. I was also under the impression that Libertarians would see the school vouchers as a step in the right direction -- allowing the people to choose (privatizing public schools and handing out vouchers in order to end the debate about religous education in schools...among other things). Perhaps I'm wrong in at least one of these assumptions.
-Turkey
I don't know why this was modded "Funny."
Contrary to what they want many peope to believe, the ACLU does not "defend the Constitution." They merely use it as a tool when it advances their agenda, and ignore it when it doesn't.
ACLU President Nadine Strossen said this about "constitutional rights" vs. "civil liberties":
source:
"Life, Liberty, and the ACLU: An Interview with Nadine Strossen"
Reason, October 1994
Is that the government uses it against NON-TERRORISTS.
Not only that, the government has used it against non-terrorists MORE THAN it has been used against terrorists.
It's a bad law, just like the DMCA, that gives the executive branch too much power without the benefit of the checks and balances of which our government is based.
There is no such right. There cannot be, because it is impossible to provide it, as long as people continue to meet each other. At some point you have to trust your neighbor not to try to kill you; in part, you rely on people being mostly reasonable, and in part, you earn the trust by behaving in a reasonable manner towards your neighbor.
IAAL (I Am A Lawyer) and this is entirely meaningless unless it is ruled by the supreme court. Hopefully on appeal the Supreme Court accepts this case.
You don't understand. Hopefully the USSC does NOT hear this case. If they refuse to hear it, the current ruling stands.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Well the parent post was not intended to be trolling, but it has been deemed such. I can only complain.
Yes, it is the neoconservatives who initially steered the Republican party so far to the right that questioning their direction or leadership was unpatriotic. But Republican party on a whole is clueless if they dont wake up and realize where they will end up in the near future. The party is so tunnel minded that they cant see beyond George Bush, heck, GW cant see beyond GW. Thats the folly. This country is not looking to its past at the mistakes made in foreign policy, it is looking to solve the problems in the present with narrow minded, short term solutions with no clear idea as to how to tackle the future. This administration is blatantly campaigning in fear hoping that the public wont realize they govern in obfuscation.
I blame the whole house for passing the Patriot Act. The Act itself was everything the Justice dept was salivating for the past few years, but never getting enough proponents to get safe passage. In the aftermath of Sept 11, there was enough fear, enough pseudo-patriotism in the air that to question the absence of oversight would have been deemed unpatriotic. And everyone fell under the notion that Patriot Act would ride in on a white horse and save the day. The sad truth is though initially flaunted as the cure for domestic terrorism, it is slowly but surely being used to spy on our own citizens with no judicial oversight at all. That is scary. And anyone who say otherwise has lived a sheltered existance their whole life which is about to be a memory. Slowly but surely our personal freedoms would erode, and we will look back on these days and wonder what went wrong..
Rapid Nirvana
In a victory today for the ACLU, (and many Slashdotters I presume)
How about "a victory for all of the United States" ?
What?
Maybe the political notes should go to politics.slashdot.org and not so much here, eh?
Do you think that you can actually isolate politics from this? Whoever wins in November will most likely be appointing at least one Supreme Court justice. Do you really think Bush would be picking nominees who feel that PATRIOT is unconstitutional? That would be one of those 'activist' judges....
When Giuliani replaces Ashcroft in Bush Jr Part II, he'll be smart enough to pass a Patriot Act that won't get overturned, despite its fascist mechanics. Or you can vote for Kerry in November.
--
make install -not war
That's the whole point. When a cop gets a court order or a warrant you have judicial oversight, as well as a publicly available paper trail. Allow unwarranted (and secret) searches and siezures like the PA did, and not only are you removing a crucial check & balance, but you are effectively pissing on the Constitution.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Also... history shows that Liberty does not reside in the "goodwill" of those currently in office... those names and faces are transitory. Liberty resides in a system of enforced written laws which prevent those currently in office from restricting it.
If you give the government a power, it will eventually use it.
The problem with the patriot act is that throws the intended checks and balances between the legislative and judicial branches of the govt. Finally somebody stepped up and layed that out in plain english. The patriot act does absolutely nothing to combat terrorism. Bin Laden's camel rider letter carrier is not likely to be intercepted via a FBI wiretap.
Got Code?
They won when they successfully induced terror. Duh.
(New York Mayor) Rudy Giuliani was encouraging everyone to not give the attackers the satisfaction of becoming paralyzed.
It's the federal government who collectively peed themselves in fear and did a lot of stupid things in response. *That*, not the death and destruction of the attack itself, was what made it successful.
It was very clever force multiplication to use commercial aircraft to attack buildings. It was even cleverer force multiplication to use Congress to attack the Constitution and people of the United States.
The plane doesn't have a choice, but I'm really disgusted that Congress let themselves be used as puppets dancing to the attackers' tune in that way.
... if the goal of the terrorists was to uphold the Constitution, then I don't think that'd be so bad.
Something makes me think 'the terrorists' and Ashcroft have frighteningly similar opinions on -that-, though. Both would rather live in a theocracy...
The enemies of Democracy are
I will tell you what scares me, and it is not arbitrary imprisonment (I figure that is so unconstitutional that they won't dare do that one again without at a minimum Congressional authorization or better yet a full suspension of Habeus but if that happens, we might as well leave the country).
What scares me is the fact that the Bush administration is putting mechanisms in place which can be used to arbitrarily make your life miserable for whatever reasons the executive sees fit. These include no-fly lists, among other things. It scares me that these mechanisms could be used in ways which could effectively silence certain forms of political discourse.
I am not afraid that I might become the next Jose Padilla. I am afraid that I might become punished for talking about airport security, etc. and that I might be forbidden to fly or have other arbitrary sanctions put on my activities which may be difficult to challenge in court.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I seriously doubt you're a lawyer, because no lawyer I know would be so reckless as to make this statement. It's just plain wrong
;) Being wrong doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for deciding not to make a statement.
Obviously, you haven't met many lawyers.
Disclaimer: Do I look like a lawyer ?
h p#00194 5
It looks like Kerry had written couple of bills before that allow investigation of banks, assets forefiture, etc. Later those bills were added to USAPATRIOT Act.
This case is, OTOH, is about which records Ashcroft could demand without court oversight, and wether they could keep those searches secret. If FBI has a warrant, they could look at your financial records without USAPATRIOT. USAPATRIOT, however, also allows them to look at your records without court warrant - which is evil.
Read more here:
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.p
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
"Still, if we're going to fight a war we can't win, wouldn't it be better to fight one of the dangers that really do face us on a daily basis?"
:( Or at least some are trying....
You have an excellent point. But it appears that we CAN win a war on our liberty
So whatever law you want to have in you country, don't ask yourself the question "how this law can be used in good hands". Ask the question "how this law can be used when the filthiest, dirtest, stupidest bastards will rule my country (and sooner or later they probably will)". Only the law that cannot be used to anything wrong EVEN by the most vicious ruler is truly good.
Which is of course, no law. Law is by definition coercive, and coercion is the most fundamental evil. "good" and "evil" are only defined with respect to our desires, what we desire is defined as good, and what we despise is defined by evil. Obviously different individuals have different desires, and so good and evil are always relative terms. But the important thing is that coersion subverts ones will, and so whenever you use force, you are committing evil against some section of the population.
Think about it this way. If a law was entirely good, people would want to follow it, so no coersion would be required, so no law woul be required.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So it occured to me that the fundimental failing of our political process is fairly simple. It became obvious some time back that you cannot successfully legislate morals, so the people in power pandered and began legislating what I call "moralisim".
The legislation of Moralisim is what happens when you cannot pass a ban on a book, so you establish a "community standards" test to allow each community to decide to ban the book because it would be bad to "force them to accept the book." In Moralisim, if you can not achieve the ban, you ban banning the ban...
It's a back-handed logical trick, like arguing to authority, where you open up patchwork of recursively nested micro-fifes. Consider "Dry" neighborhoods in "Wet" cities in "Dry" counties. You get to a place where you can't ban the book, so you ban yourself from controlling the ban on books and leave it up your political constituents to "decide for themselves".
It produces little political kingdoms where vocal extremests and idealogues can stake out parts of the landscape for various dogmatic purposes.
It also "levels the playing field" in a way that isnt right, but that "sounds fair" to those who are not paying proper heed. This ersatz seeming fairness can then be used as "authority" unilaterally. It rases a cloud of uncertainty where any stupid thing becomes possible as an "act of the people" because all "rights" become beasts of equal prescidence.
Consider: I have the right to keep and bare arms, you have the right not to be gunned down at the Circle-K. These two rights do *not* hold equal precidence, the right not to be gunned down is ever-so-more significant. This does *NOT* however mean that the right to keep and bare arms is somehow "punctured" and suddenly goes away. The fact is that these two rights are not really in conflict because the responsable exercise of one doesn't lead enexorably to the violation of the other.
Compare this then to "smoking", you have the right to smoke and I have the right not to. Here the right not to smoke trounces the right to smoke. You are asked to step out side. It didn't have to be that way, if the smokers had always "smoked responsibly" by observing other peoples right to smoke, they would have stepped out side all along and there woudn't have to be bans. (They probably wouldn't throw polyester butts on the gound either were responsibility the watchword in smokers... 8-) But the refrain of "why do I have to leave, I have the right to somke" with the hidden codicil "anywhere I damn well please no matter what the consequences."
See, the responsibility has gone, along with most of the burden of dilligence and accountability, and so "rights" rule supreme.
This is the inevetable result of Moralist policies. Moralisim is the proverbial washing-of-hands. "We didn't rule on this, it is the will of our populous and our populous has that right." Nudge nudge, wink wink...
The PATRIOT Act is a natural outgrowth of the Moralist agenda. It supports a vacation of responsibility and accountability in the name of preserving the "right to safety." The penetration and disapation of the "right to privacy and due process", it says, must be spent as the inferior right because in the moralist realm whenever two rights come into conflict one must be supreme, a "true right" and one must be defeated utterly as not having really been a right at all.
What's actually kind of funny is that Moralisim is a revival of the old Might makes Right paradigm. We set our ideals up against one another to see which one will beat the other to death in a court of public spectacle.
So there is a hierarchy of rights, but only in the presence of responsibilities and accountabilities.
But it really _isn't_ any kind of balancing act. You are not supposed to pay for one right, like safety, by betraying another, like due process.
You are supposed to pay for rights with the currency of responsibility.
We harvest today the fruits of terrorisim becau
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
When even with the info lower level agents get ignored because "terrorist" actions are merely part of the plan? something like a "new pearl harbor" like event And which is it again, when you are "following orders", do you investigate, or shine it on because some "superior" individual has connections with those you are supposedly investigating, so vital information gets ignored on purpose? Why is it, when someone with the legal and law enforcement cred of David Schippers, successful impeacher of a freekin president, successful chicago area mob prosecutor, can't even get word to ashcroft (I'm sure you heard of that gent) about upcoming bad news scenarios despite repeated and exhaustive attempts? Why is that, an "unfortunate intelligence failure"? Or was it because it was ON PURPOSE. Ignored, avoided on purpose?
Sorry, I'll be way way WAY more impressed when some white guys in suits and uniforms get indicted by a grand jury for some charges up to and including murder and treason. You can talk about "additional powers" then, once you effectively use the ones you already have, and a LOT more of you come forward like the small handful of TRULY brave and honest agents have,and stop being chicken for your careers over the nations safety. Follow your oath, not your paycheck in other words. Use your brain for something more than to absorb "commands". You're an agent, they are supposed to QUESTION things, not just blindly follow orders, they are supposed to deal in data, not be part of a massive coverup that's destroying a nation and imperiling the entire planet.
Nuhremberg established the precedent, "following orders" is no excuse for helping along high crimes and misdemeanors, and being as it's the internet age and some decent info is available, there's no excuse for remaining so uninformed other than laziness and an uncaring attitude and blind obedience and brainwashing.
Oh, the links? There's hundreds more, THOUSANDS more,just use google, 9-11, government prior knowledge is a good start. I'm not going to do your work for you, and if you had been paying attention even just on slashdot you would have already seen quite a few of them dropped, in many articles and in many comments.
Educate thyself before wanting to make all the US people some "enemy" to "investigate". We have had enough of the surveil/command/CONTROL aspect of this and the recent past US "regimes" and their (mostly) *mercenaries*. Stop being a stooge for them killers and thieves.
Here, I'll give you an easy one. How did WTC building 7 manage to fall down? Here's another easy one, bush and company, including rice, swore to the 9-11 "investigative commission" that they had "no idea that planes could be used for hijacking and then used as weapons" and etc.. uh huh. How do you explain terrorist hijacking scenario drills, one being run the same day as the attacks then? A COINCIDENCE? You smelling a rat yet? I hope so, I really do.. we need more honest cops, less blind order followers. I hope you are one of the former.
Sure, we know the system works. It just doesn't work fast enough. This law should of been completly shot down by now.
:)
I'd like to see some sort of ammendment that requires 3 randomly chosen (through a lottery) federal judges to review the law before it goes into effect. If two or all three say no, then it goes through a randomly chosen district to check it's constitutionality.
Too bad it'll never happen.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.