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The Continuing Hunt for PATRIOT Act Abuses
Throtex writes "Orin Kerr, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at The Volokh Conspiracy that the Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act. This follows from the fact that what the media originally aired as abuses were merely allegations of abuse at the time. Could it be that there has just been a lot of fuss over nothing?"
It doesn't matter if there have been any abuses or not.
What matters is whether the potential is there for abuse or not.
America has stayed free for 200+ years because her people learned a lesson earlier than most others: you don't wait for the secret police to show up at your door to start demanding your rights. Because by then it's too late.
Read my blog.
Defenders of the USA Patriot Act love to defend it by asking its critics how the Patriot Act has personally affected them. Well, I love to turn this argument against them by asking how terrorism has personally affected them, because for the vast majority of the public, terrorism has not affected their lives in any way. The government's response to terrorism, OTOH, has made life much more difficult though for law-abiding citizens.
The reality is that the 9/11 attacks resulted in very few people being killed compared to the number of people that die in, say, auto accidents. The potential for abuse by government officials is simply too great, and even if no abuses have yet been found, the track record of the government is pretty poor in this regard.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
From what I understand, the Patriot Act consists most of legislation that law enforcement agencies (notably the FBI) have been trying to pass for years. Bascially, they wanted the powers the lost after the excesses of the Vietnam era back again. I don't know much about this personally, but a lawyer who is purportedly an expert on the act told me very little of it was drafted around the time it was introduced. The took all these old, failed bills, slapped them together with some language about terrorism, and rammed it through using some dirty tactics. Not many copies were actually distributed before it was voted on, and it was only distrubuted less than a day before the vote. This is a gigantic legal document, so there was no possibility to know what was in it before the vote. Another lawyer i spoke with, from the ACLU, told me that the day after this passed they received calls from numerous congressman who wanted to know what the hell they'd just voted for. Democracy in action!