Slashdot Mirror
How has the USA PATRIOT Act Affected You?
wetdogjp asks: "October 26th, 2004 marked the third anniversary of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (or USA PATRIOT Act, as it is more commonly known). While the Slashdot crowd can certainly muster the enthusiasm to debate its pro's and con's, I'd like to know: How has the USA PATRIOT Act affected you, personally? How has it interfered with your personal and professional life? Has this act influenced your Presidential vote?"
I haven't been affected... yet...
In Wisconsin I voted for Feingold, the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act, for that very reason.
Badnarik's take on it:
A party organizer told the candidate they'd have to leave to make his flight. So, would Badnarik repeal the Patriot Act? "In a heartbeat," he answered. "In a heartbeat." Then, despite the time, he couldn't resist expounding: "Technically, I cannot repeal the Patriot Act, because in Marbury v. Madison, a Supreme Court decision from 1803, the Supreme Court ruled that any law repugnant to the Constitution is null and void," he said. "And it is null and void from the day you enact it, not from the day you discover it's unconstitutional. So from my point of view, the Patriot Act does not exist," he said. Source
I live about 50 miles from both Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and I live about 10 minutes from Fort Detrick. In my travels around these areas including the three airports I cannot say that I have been affected by the Patriot Act and I don't know anybody who has been. This could obviously change any day now but so far, so good.
http://www.busyweather.com/
In the past, I have had many web companies opened as Schedule C busineses.
Now, because of the Patriot aAct, opening a small business forces you to fill out so many extra forms so the government can track your money, you almost need to hire a lawyer.
Now, do you REALLY think they want to track terror money? NO! What they want to do it make sure you report all your income.
Fine. I do anyway, but call a spade a spade. Don't wrap this crap in a bill called the Patriot Act.
MC
So, while those might not be answers you like, there are at least three reasons why at least 29 million people (as of 22:50 EST) could vote for Bush. They weighed those issues against such things as war, taxes, environment, and that's what they chose. Indeed, you can make a similar list for those some 27 million who voted for Kerry. The thing is, there is no single objective standard that most are willing to accept by which to judge candidates and their platforms, so we still have this voting process. Personally, I like voting better than trying to beat up all the people who think differently than I, because I know I'd have been pummelled quite some time ago.
Yes, there are some folks who vote irrationally, and some who actually deliberate over which issues they are going to weigh more than others and vote a certain way even considering the shortcomings of the person (and by consequence, administration) for whom they have voted.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I've said it before, I'll say it again because no one has done it for me yet.
Show me the section of the patriot act which gives the government the authority to obtain a "secret" warant.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
" wacko... seriously, we live in a democracy as you're witnessing tonight - not a dictatorship"
First off, this is NOT a democracy, it is a representative republic. When is the last time YOU voted on a new law? If this was in fact a democracy, your vote would decide who is president, not the Electoral College's.
"Paranoia is out there..."
I agree, I guess that's why you posted anonymously!
The PATRIOT Act also allows _any_ judge anywhere in the country to authorize a search of your house, no matter where you live. In other words, the feds need only find one single judge to rubber stamp their warrants and they have essentially unlimited power of searches in every state of the union. So just what good is the requirement of a warrant?
Dyolf Knip
" indefinite imprisonment of anyone,
Material Witness.....
It allowed my former employer to wrongfully terminate me based on a false accusation but I could not pursue the wrongful termination because they turned their accusations over to the FBI forcing me to shut-up. Accouding to Jenifer Granick at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society "As a general rule, I believe that it is extremely dangerous to give information to the FBI without any immunity agreement or promises. Its my experience also that they can not necessarily be counted on to understand computer cases well." Bottom line - I got screwed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A16287-2003Mar23¬Found= true
i d= 9392
Under prior law, if the primary purpose of a search was to obtain "foreign intelligence information," the FBI could obtain a secret warrant through the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct a physical search or wiretap without notifying the target of the search. The counter-terrorism law lowers the standard to permit the FBI to conduct a secret search or wiretap if intelligence surveillance is a significant purpose of the search. Thus, under the new law, law enforcement could conduct secret searches for the primary purpose of investigating criminal activity, with the auxiliary significant purpose of intelligence surveillance. This could circumvent the 4th Amendment's probable cause requirement for obtaining a search warrant.
from
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?o
Piracy is Adam Smiths invisble hand fisting you in the ass, Mr. Gates. - MightyMartian (840721)
Padilla has not been charged with a crime, and does not have access to a lawyer in his detention.
Source
11/3/04 - 6/9/02 = 2 years, 4 months, and 3 weeks.
No charges, no trial, no lawyer. Nothing. Welcome to your new home citizen. Enjoy your stay here at the Ministry of Love.
Terrorism refers to the methodology of using violence to incite a fearful reaction from a civilian population, for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or social goal. Terrorist acts can be carried out by individuals, groups, or governments.
The use of the terms terrorism and terrorist is politically weighted, as these terms (and historically, other terms like them) are often used in propaganda to drum up support in opposition to the designated "terrorists."
Nations that support forms of organized violence (particularly where civilians are harmed) will tend to dissociate themselves from the term, and will use neutral or even positive terms to characterize their own combatants - such as soldiers, freedom fighters and patriots, all of which can be ambiguous.
Terrorist is a term for one who is personally involved in an act of terrorism. Terrorist tactics may also be used by dissident groups or other actors to achieve political ends or for purposes of extortion.
You don't think McVehigh counts as a terrorist? I pray people in Oklahoma are not nearly as ignorant as you.
"Oh, there go the terrorists" example: There is the footage of Mohammed Atta checking in at the airport.
Well, for one, you didn't answer what I asked, you didn't provide me with a section. But here is the section you're refering to:
SEC. 218. FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION.
Sections 104(a)(7)(B) and section 303(a)(7)(B) (50 U.S.C. 1804(a)(7)(B) and 1823(a)(7)(B)) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 are each amended by striking `the purpose' and inserting `a significant purpose'.
For 2, this doesn't change things. The FBI could still obtain taps against you under FISA. What this does is allow the FBI to persue a criminal prosecution if they find said information. Furthermore, it ignores two very important aspects.
1) If you were in court over this, and lawer worth his salt would argue that any basic criminal evidence found falls under this aspect of FISA
C) that such information cannot reasonably be obtained by normal investigative techniques;
And you would get said evidence suppressed.
2) It also ignores that there are a ton of hurdles to jump through to use any FISA tap against a US citizen.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Maybe secret's the wrong term, but it's illegal for you to disclose that you've been served by such a warrant. See http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html , section 215, revision to 501 (d):
"`(d) No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section."
So a warrant exists, and no one is allowed to mention it. They must keep it a "secret". Thus you could call it a secret warrant, though a "classified" warrant might be more accurate.
So that is the section of the patriot act which gives the government the authority to obtain a "secret" warrant.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Wrong, they do need a search warrant, they just don't need to tell you in advance. Please read: http://www.factcheck.org/article259.html so you can understand what you're talking about.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
It is not the CIA or NSA that the act gave capabilities to. They already had it. It was to DOJ and DOD that gained. They had limited access to this kind of knowledge. The difference is that the DOJ and DOD are far more political than either CIA or NSA.
Patriot Act II did give some more capabilities to all of them
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Okay I have tended to do large numbers of web searches on subjects of government corruption, scandals, intelligence agency acronyms, high performance computing, cryptography, and emerging technologies. It appears my web surfing habits may have set off a few alarms. That and perhaps also the fact that I happen to collect firearms as a hobby, as well as subscribe to several gun magazines.
I have been followed closely and aggressively by cars both while driving my own car and while riding my bicycle near my home. The bicycle incident was like something out of a movie. I mean I was followed closely by a car while riding my bike, for about a quarter mile. How indiscreet is that?
I have been photographed multiple times by complete strangers under circumstances that suggest I had been staked out, and for the sole purpose of photographing me.
Now here's a good one. Usually (but not always) when I happen to mention in passing certain keywords during phone calls, such as weapon, nuclear, terrorism, asassinate or similar nasty words like that, almost immediately I'll hear a very brief touch-tone in the earpiece. It is so brief, maybe a twentieth of a second, that I cannot identify exactly which touch-tone it is... however I'm enough of a phone phreak that I can tell you it is from the fourth column of touch-tones of a 4X4 pad, in other words it is one of the A, B, C or D Touch-Tones. It is from that column. I experience this not only on my Comcast line, not only on my VoicePulse VoIP line, but even on my Verizon cell phone line whether at home or roaming. It has even happened while using an AT&T calling card from a hotel room phone. This is VERY freaky in my opinion... I have no explanation for these tones during my phone calls, nor am I aware of any surveillance equipment that behaves this way. However, I do know that normal phone switching equipment does not sporadically, and frequently produce these sounds. But this keeps happening. It happened to me yesterday.
I call an old friend on the phone, in another state, and within 24 hours that friend, out of the blue, also gets photographed by a complete stranger.
I have another friend, one with web surfing habits very similar to my own. He loves intrigue perhaps even more than I do. But it seems this friend had actually viewed some very frightening technical information out on the web, information possibly related to classified research. The nature of the information itself freaked him out a bit. But since then, he has seen the US government sites in question get taken down, deleted from DNS, purged from the Google cache, and even purged from the internet archive's wayback machine. Some of the information he did manage to save on disk.
An anonymizing proxy server he had been using went from many peers down to only one peer, and then it went offline. Then almost simultaneously, his cable internet service went down for several hours, for the first time ever.
Within 24 hours, a car pulls into this same friend's driveway in the middle of the night, a man gets out, promptly takes a very powerful flash picture of my friend's house, and then jumps back in the car and speeds away. The car's direction of arrival suggested that it had driven against the normal direction of traffic on his street prior to pulling into his driveway and taking the picture. My friend reports that the flash from this picture was much, much more powerful than an ordinary consumer camera flash.
During the day, two cars that do not belong to any of his neighbors sat parked, with men in them, at either end of his block. When he drives past one of them, it suddenly starts up and begins following him. This went on for weeks, and ceased happening a few months ago.
I have this same friend pick me up at the airport, from an international flight. And the very next day, he gets photographed by a stranger. Then his house gets broken into. He comes home to a front door which is swinging open, but with no signs of forced entry.
Really? It hasn't happened? Short memory there.
Uh... I think you mean George Orwell. You know, the same chap who wrote 'Animal Farm'.
Orson Welles was the guy behind the panic-inducing radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, the movie 'Citizen Kane', etc. He never had anything to do with '1984'.
You got most of the details wrong.
The suit was aimed at stopping the Arizona (3rd) debate, on the grounds that the bipartisan (Democrat and Republican run) event is not nonpartisan, and therefore shouldn't be held at an Arizona public institution using Arizona public funds.
The Centre for Presidential Debates was properly served earlier that day in DC-the "serving" at the St Louis debate (which wasn't sued over) was a publicity stunt, yes. But the serving was legit as Badnarik isn't a party to the suit (the plaintiff was the Arizona Libertarian Party).
So your "they waited till the night of the debate", "the debate was already happening", " you can't serve papers for a lawsuit you are involved in" and "They didn't actually get it to court" comments are misinformed.
The order was served on October 8, (the same day as the St Louis debates), the matter did get to court on October 12, and the Arizona debate was October 13. As I understand it, there has yet to be a ruling.
It's not the "Patriot" Act; it's the "USAPATRIOT" Act.
Please use the full acronym, or its full name: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
The "USAPATRIOT" Act has nothing to do with patriotism, so calling it the "Patriot Act" is misleading.
(Considering how the Act is being misused these days, even using its full name is somewhat misleading (How is copyright infringement "terrorism"?).)
Personally, I pronounce it "the you sap at riot act" to avoid confusion.
Other pronunciations are "the US ap uh TRY ot act" and (as Jar-Jar) "the YOUsa pah TR-R-RE-E-E at act".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Why is this modded funny? This is making a serious point.
Keith D.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) the Declaration of Independance is not a law, it's just a document. They represent the ideas that we've supposedly based our government on, but it has no legal merit. I'm sure you weren't implying that, but some people seem to think it's part of the Constitution.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It wasn't really voluntary, since I was being threatened. Not to mention that even if I had had my senses about me that I could have refused anyway, because my parents would have made me hand it over.
We've had a few customers targeted by the Feds under the Patriot Act. The requests always come "in person", there's never any paperwork and they just want mail headers. Shipped out every week on a CD-ROM.
I find this rather disturbing, as should you.
The reservations are on land that settlers didn't want. Native Americans who live on the reservations are often barred from working off the reservation, either by law (in some cases they're not considered U.S. citizens) or because of discrimination. Most of the reservations have no economy to speak of other than a small amount of tourism (and maybe the casinos you mentioned, but only in some cases). Poverty and alcoholism are usually rampant, and if there is a casino, many of the folks on the reservation don't see any money from it because of corruption.
A few years ago I went on a service trip to Oaks Indian School, which is basically an Lutheran-run orphanage on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. It was an eye-opening experience. I'm originally from a rural area of Ohio just on the edge of the Rust Belt, so I had a little bit of an idea what poverty looks like. I had no idea it would be as bad as it was. Just absolutely heartbreaking.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
The main problem is that our Judicial branch no longer has the power to grant/revoke wiretap privileges. All they can do now is to verify that a form stating that the FBI, et al, has filled out some forms correctly to proceed with wiretapping.
http://sg1archive.com/nightmare.shtml
(I am the wife of the target of the investigation, aka "HurricaneMB" in the attached comments.)
The story was posted on slashdot a while back too, but I don't have the link at the moment. The slashdot comments critized our story for being vague. Well, duh, there's an ongoing criminal investigation. What were we supposed to do, hand the feds their case on a silver platter? Tons of reporters called asking for more details, but our laywer, who was kinda pissed that we posted anything at all on the internet, said not to talk to them. When this is all over (hopefully sometime next year), we will tell our story in much more detail.
And yes, it did influence our vote for President.
"We have to remember, the number of terrorists convicted as a direct result of these infractions on our Bill of Rights remains a big 0."
Actually, the number is a little bit higher than that:
"The report said the act helped secure six guilty pleas from an al Qaeda "sleeper cell" in Lackawanna, N.Y.; allowed the surveillance of a reputed terror cell in Portland, Ore., resulting in convictions of six persons in a scheme to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces; and the successful prosecution of a money launderer for Colombia's leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC."
We are still counting al Qeada sleeper cells as terrorists, aren't we?
I don't see the sentence where he blames only the Republicans in Congress.
Bring on the asteroid
My wife and I applied for a Home Depot Expo credit card before we begin redoing our kitchen. We listed both of our incomes since together they were pretty high and because my credit is much better than that of my wife, we hoped to up her score (long story short, her credit is much better now but I digress...) Well I get a letter stating that I am approved and she can be a cardholder but they cannot issue a joint account. I call Expo's credit services to inquire why I can't have a joint account-was it my wife's credit? Was it something else... The minimum waged person answering the phone says to me: "It's because of the PATRIOT ACT." I stopped for a second, paused in disbelief, and said: "The PATRIOT ACT?" She responded: "Yes, the PATRIOT ACT." Okay so now I am angry and wondering if I am suddenly considered a terrorist threat (which after that Franks and Beans dinner last night may actually be....) I ask to speak to a supervisor... Supervisor gets on the phone, very nicely, explains that due to the increased paperwork and documentation required by the PATRIOT ACT, Home Depot and Home Depot Expo no longer give out joint accounts, only a second card for applicants spouses... I ask incredulously, "The PATRIOT ACT?" She says "Yes." Because of potential money-laundering issues, banks and other financial institutions have to keep track of every social security number and new account... Now I can understand that you can get fertilizer and diesel fuel at a Home Depot or at least the fertilizer, and borrow one of their cute little trucklets, but give me a break. If we had a joint account we'd have almost double our credit line. Now it pays for my wife to open a separate account... The worst part, Home Depot still hasn't changed their credit application and nowhere in the disclosures does it mention the lack of availability of joint accounts...
So, only criminals fear the cops?
True story: a cousin of mine is involved with in a child custody case. The father is a cop - doesn't want anything to do with her (one night stand), but is fighting for custody of the baby. He has illegally taped her phone conversations, harassed her, attempted to enter her home against her express permission, done god knows what sort of research into non-publically-available files in order to get ammunition for the court case... and it's twice as hard to stop him because he's a cop. She's not a criminal, but she certainly needs to fear the police. And it's not just him - who knows how many of his fellow officers are willing to abuse their powers to "help one of their own"?
Truth is, the more power you give policemen and law enforcement in general, the more that power will get abused. PATRIOT act is a perfect example; it's intended to fight terrorism, but people who have nothing to do with terror are being attacked with it. It may be true that some of them are guilty of other crimes... but that doesn't make the abuse OK. If 20,000 people have their rights violated to catch 10 criminals, then PATRIOT is wrong, wrong, wrong. It violates not only the letter but the spirit of the Constitution of the United States - same one Ashcroft, Bush, etc., have sworn to uphold.
"Laws aren't enough to prevent bad people from doing bad things."
Nope. You got that right. But PATRIOT makes it easier for law enforcement to do bad things.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Interestingly, my wife and I pay more taxes than we would if we were single. So, at least in Virginia, USA, you should be advocating gay marriage, since then the buggers will pay more taxes.