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ACLU Drops Challenge Over Patriot Act
An anonymous reader writes, "The ACLU announced on Friday that they were dropping their case against the US Government over the highly contested section 215 of the Patriot Act. ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson stated: 'While the reauthorized Patriot Act is far from perfect, we succeeded in stemming the damage from some of the Bush administration's most reckless policies. The ACLU will continue to monitor how the government applies the broad Section 215 power and we will challenge unconstitutional demands on a case-by-case basis.'"
Reauthorized means, passed through congress again. :P I think it's significant that congress was dumb enough to let it get by again without more of a fuss. But then, i suppose this isn't a subject that anybody could raise without getting tarred and feathered.
There are lives at stake here!
Oh, you're right. The government would operate so much more efficiently if there were no descent. Let's just get rid of the judicial system and the legislature, too. They're just wastes of my hard earned dollars!
Do you have evidence that the Patriot Act actually improved anything? I don't.
Is there any evidence that there are fewer institutional barriers to cooperation and coordination? Because if the rest of the agencies effected by the Patriot Act were reorganized like FEMA was, i don't feel very confident that the changes made to the US government are of any use at all.
Also, there is a difference between policy consensus, and the reality of implementation. (for instance, integrating national crime databases, sounds like a great idea, but apparently this isn't an IT project the government could handle building)
There are lives at stake here!
Like the Republicans who currently control the purse strings wouldn't have found a way to increase government expenditures and take money out of your pocket.
You know, like wanting to prosecute Jose Padilla as a terrorist, holding this american citizen in jail for three years without counsel then dropping all terror related charges and finally settling on a charge of aiding terrorists in a civil, not military, court.
Seems that the government knew its case wasn't going to fly so it settled on lesser charges and claimed victory. After spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money on legal fees on a case they couldn't win.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
IANAL, but traditionally one drops a case if one is payed off, if one is likely to lose, or if one might lose and it's a bad test case for the issue. (The last applies if you're more concerned with the system than with one or two particular clients.) In this case, might the case have been dropped because of the possibility of it raising the "right to privacy" question before the supreme court? With the current court, such a question opens the door wide on abortion--there's no explicit right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution, and Roe v. Wade depends heavily on it. This may simply be far from the ideal court (or case) with which to revisit the question of that implicit right.
So maybe they did the math. Lose the right to privacy en masse or gain a little bit o' facism.
Virtually no Americans have died in America from terrorist attacks following implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Now you might argue that this came at the cost of liberties, which I totally dispute. However, to say that the USA PATRIOT Act has accomplished nothing flies in the face of the last several years of demonstrable safety in the homeland versus terrorist attacks.
You must remember, the USA PATRIOT Act is largely just an adaptation of the RICO Act, extending it to those involved in terrorism. There were some limitations on law enforcement which prevented them from preventing terrorism. Some of those limitations have been modified by the USA PATRIOT Act to allow law enforcement to more properly function in this arena. That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
How much safer? Up for debate. Does it erode freedoms in the process? Up for debate. Has it made us safer? Obviously.
Joe Mainusch http://www.weber-amps.com
After the first attack on the WTT, there were no more attacks on American soil. And that was done without the patriot act. So, by your level of proof, I guess that it "proves" that patriot act is not needed, just a pres. with a desire to prevent it.
To state that it has made us safer is up for debate as well. There is no proof that it done its job.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Right. What slays me is the regular folk who are so partisan in favor of one political party or the other. Give me a break! The party in power always grabs more power and the opposition tries to stop them. Why? Duh...to stay in power. When the winds of political change come, all they do they switch places.
People may originally get into politics for noble reasons but, eventually, it becomes about "doing business." And whether they are Republicans or Democrats it makes no difference. Eventually the media-government-business complex will select from among the candidates that they can "do business" with (sorry for ending my sentence with a preposition). What, you thought that you actually had a choice? Get real.
Like the old saw goes, power corrupts. But what gets me is these self-righteous A-holes who honestly think they they wouldn't be corrupted by it.
"Has it made us safer? Obviously."
I wore a red shirt yesterday and a green shirt today. It was colder yesterday than it is today. Therefore, wearing a green shirt makes the temperature warmer.
How is this reasoning any different than yours? Correlation does not imply causation
I haven't been attacked by tigers all my life. Clearly this is due to my tiger-repelling stone. To say that this stone has accomplished nothing flies in the face of the last twenty-one years of demonstrable safety versus tiger attacks.
1995 -> 2001 didn't have any significant terrorist attacks either. Change to 1996-2001 if you prefer to include the Unabomber as significant during that time period, though I'd argue that you'd then need to include the November 2001 anthrax-letter attacks (insignificant as they were, they were more so than late-period Unabomber IMO).
Virtually no Americans have died in America from terrorist attacks following implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Virtually no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to the Patriot Act, either, excepting one particular day in September. I am far more inclined to attribute the relative safety of the past 5 years to status quo than to some hastily and ill-conceived piece of legislation, but that's just me.
That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
This is not obvious to me. That the Act mandates better comms between the alphabet soup agencies is a Good Thing, but at what cost? How many freedoms and liberties lost or curtailed? How much indignity? How much opacity added to the process?
I mean, do you really feel safer when Gatorade is banned from airline flights? I think the continuous fostering of unfounded paranoia does us more regular damage. After all, if the point of terrorism is to make us feel fear and thereby use it as a weapon, and that is bad, then I can see no good in the fear mongering of our own elected officials. That is the real and continuing cost of 9/11.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
I have a stone that protects from tigers that I think you would like to buy...
succeed in stemming the damage from ACLU. I'm willing to give up some of my freedoms and rights for a while. I have no problem with it. Also the none of my civil rights have been broken. I don't know why everyone feels the government will be listening to EVERY phone call that gets made anywhere in America. Its just not possible to monitor them all. They monitor incoming international calls from certain people and outgoing international calls to certain people. They aren't listening to you talking to your grandma and could care less about that.
Its all find and dandy that the ACLU is trying to protect my civil liberties but when they are pushing to have a cross on the side of a road where someone has died be removed or pushing to have a stone ten commandments be removed, how are these civil liberties away from anyone? Also the ACLU standing up and demanding that all prisoners of war, regardless of what they did be released if the evidence against them is not made public.
the ACLU needs to be investigated in my opinion.
Couldn't you use this argument to discontinue the wasteful and inefficient practice of holding elections?
I am not a crackpot.
It says "no person," not "no citizen" or "no non-combatant" or anything else. It means no person, period. That includes Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and Satan himself. In other words, your "clarification" is explicitly unconstitutional!
You betcha! What, are you afraid he'd somehow manage to win anyway? Don't you have any confidence in our laws and the ability of the US prosecution to put forth enough evidence to convict him?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Its all find and dandy that the ACLU is trying to protect my civil liberties but when they are pushing to have a cross on the side of a road where someone has died be removed or pushing to have a stone ten commandments be removed, how are these civil liberties away from anyone?"
There's something going on if you can't tell the difference between different types of public land.
Roads are public in the COMMON sense - a cross memorialising someone who died on a particular stretch doesn't actually impose on anything besides things like "Hey, keep in mind some crap driver (maybe on something) killed a person here. Remember them, and, you know, heads up.". I would CERTAINLY remind my local ACLU chapter they have bigger fish to fry if they were going after any of these.
Courthouses are public in the sense of PUBLIC SECTOR. As in Government. This should go without saying, but I get the sensation it bears repeating here. Putting a stone tablature of the Commandments is problematic for a reason; namely that propping them in the rotunda of your local International House of Law acts as an implicit "We (the law) enforce this in these parts" (Which someone who actually cares about freedom of religion or right of consent SHOULD take issue with, or at least with the left half and possibly #7) and at worst serves as a state endorsement of religion (While not as bad as actually erecting a state religious sect, it's ALSO covered under 1st Amendment concerns).
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
They weren't stupid, they were trying to hold onto their jobs. Vote against PATRIOT Act and in the next election, your opposition will campaign on it because you obviously 'are against keeping us SAFE', and in some cases 'want the terrists to WIN'.
Remember how they got the Federal ID law passed? They tailgated it on the back end of an appropriation bill reputedly to supply body armor to the troops in Iraq. You couldn't vote against the rider without voting for the appropriation. Would YOU want to face re-election when the opposition says 'Hey, he voted AGAINST body armor for our troops!!!'?
What really needs to happen is stopping the practice of putting riders on bills at the last minute. You can submarine all KINDS of nasty shit with the current system. Problem is, I don't see this happening. Ever.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Who specifically are we at war with? That is to say, other than "the terrorists." Who do we have to kill or who has to surrender to end this war, bin Laden, the Taliban? The fact is, we are not at war in any meaningful sense of the word. We are at war only in the same sense that we are at war with drugs and poverty.
As I've said elsewhere, Roe vs. Wade is a prime example of why it's a really, really bad idea to accept bad jurisprudence just because it creates a good outcome in the short term.
Roe rests on a rather silly argument. Rather than using any number of very good justifications for enabling abortion -- such as the equal protection clause, or better yet, just tossing it back to the legislature until public pressure forced the creation of a real "Right to Privacy" amendment -- the USSC created a legal fiction. Beginning with Griswold vs Connecticut, they constructed a 'phantom right,' using what's now called the "penumbra argument." Basically they said that the right to privacy is unwritten but assumed, and that it's necessary in order for the functional implementation of other enumerated rights. It's a plausible enough argument, but certainly not airtight. Compared to the logic underlying most other high court decisions, it's got flaming hoops of assumptions to jump through. It's the Evel Knievel of opinions: on one hand there's where you are, and on the other side is the result you want, and then -- holy shit, look at it go -- it stretches between the two.
The justices voting for the majority, being very smart and well-read people, (in my opinion) voted the way they did less because they were actually convinced of the correctness of the penumbra argument on strict jurisprudential grounds, than because they thought that to allow abortion was the Right Thing To Do at the time, and they figured out a way to make it happen. There is some merit to this approach -- public opinion at the time was in favor and if you looked at trends over the past decade or two, it looked as if society was on a straight, predictable path towards social liberalization. If the court had ruled otherwise, many would have felt that the results were unjust. (And they would be partially correct: the Court would have been just, but it would have been wrong; fixing the relationship between justice and rightness being the proper domain of the Legislature.)
However, by acting on a results-focused, rather than principled or jurisprudential approach, the Court gave society a number of real rights -- things that average, everyday people count on, like the ability to get contraception or an abortion without consulting a judge -- but rested them on shaky, unstable foundations.
Now, all that needs to happen for these real-world abilities to disappear, is for the jurisprudential foundation to be undermined. And now, there is little chance of a national "Right to Privacy" being passed, as there might have been if Roe or Griswold had been decided differently and there had been a public outcry of 'injustice.' It might have taken longer to get the results that people wanted, but the ultimate right would have been more secure as a result, if it had come in the form of a law or Constitutional Amendment instead of a Court opinion.
Results-focused or social-utility "jurisprudence" is almost always a cop-out, a trading of short-term gains for long-term instability and unintended consequences. That we have begun to rely on them more and more is either a sign that the Legislative branch of government is not doing its job and forcing the Judicial to step in, or that the Judicial branch is overstepping. (Which one you think it is, is infinitely debatable.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Making your population afraid is old-school, and pretty much died with the Cold War. Making your population apathetic, otoh, is what all New Totalitarianism is all about.
More than mere navel gazing.