Posted on 09/14/2003 8:03:02 PM PDT by MegaSilver
This is sounding dangerously like a potential tagline....
My biggest concern is how easy it makes it for the government to go through people's records and homes. Sure, good citizens won't have to (in theory) worry about prosecution, but it opens the door for plenty of abuse in the hands of the wrong person.
But maybe I'm overreacting a little...
My biggest concern is how easy it makes it for the government to go through people's records and homes.Since you know what is in it, you should have no problem being specific in exactly what changes the Act made to existing laws that justifies your concern.
It isn't...
Well, there's section 215. Provided the government says it's to protect terrorism, it can search through any of my personal records without my knowledge or consent.
Section 218 allows them to search my home without accountability to the Department of Justice as long as they can allege that there is any foreign intelligence basis for the search.
The big thing that makes me nervous is, what is the criteria they're using to determine "foreign intelligence basis"? I'll read up more on this later, but it's just something that makes me a little iffy. Fortunately, at least these two expire in 2005, so with just a little luck, won't have to worry about a mad[wo]man having them in place.
It was to insure that mentalities like you are never able to obtain the reins of absolute power in America, that our Founders set up the government precisely the way they did.
The Constitution stands in the way of all tyrannical extremists. It stands in the way of what you would enforce on others just as it stands in the way of the Marxist DemocRATS, and you both hate that fact.
You would be a threat to our God-given freedoms if you were ever able to obtain absolute power.
Ahhhh .... the wisdom of America's *inspired* Framers. That wisdom has been proven over and over and over again since our Founding.
Marci Hamilton, ... a nationally recognized expert on constitutional and copyright law ... [in] her forthcoming book, Copyright and the Constitution, examines the historical and philosophical underpinnings of copyright law and asserts that the American "copyright regime" is grounded in Calvinism, resulting in a philosophy that favors the product over the producer.
Calvinism? Hamilton's interest in the intersection of Calvinist theology and political philosophy emerged early in her career when she began reading the work of leading constitutional law scholars. She was puzzled by their "theme of a system of self-rule." "They talked about it as if it were in existence," she said. "My gut reaction was that direct democracy and self-rule are a myth that doesn't really exist."
What Hamilton found was that a "deep and abiding distrust of human motives that permeates Calvinist theology also permeates the Constitution."
Her investigation of that issue has led to another forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Reformed Constitution: What the Framers Meant by Representation.
That our country's form of government is a republic instead of a pure democracy is no accident, according to Hamilton. The constitutional framers "expressly rejected direct democracy. Instead, the Constitution constructs a representative system of government that places all ruling power in the hands of elected officials."
And the people? Their power is limited to the voting booth and communication with their elected representatives, she said. "The Constitution is not built on faith in the people, but rather on distrust of all social entities, including the people."
..Two of the most important framers, James Wilson and James Madison, were steeped in Presbyterian precepts.
It is Calvinism, Hamilton argued, that "more than any other Protestant theology, brings together the seeming paradox that man's will is corrupt by nature but also capable of doing good." In other words, Calvinism holds that "we can hope for the best but expect the worst from each other and from the social institutions humans devise."
"Neither Calvin nor the framers stop at distrust, however," Hamilton said. "They also embrace an extraordinary theology of hope. The framers, like Calvin, were reformers."
Emory Report November 29, 1999 Volume 52, No. 13 -Elaine Justice
"Well, there's section 215. Provided the government says it's to protect terrorism, it can search through any of my personal records without my knowledge or consent."Rebuttal:
"The furor over section 215 is a case study in Patriot Act fear-mongering. Section 215 allows the FBI to seek business records in the hands of third parties—the enrollment application of a Saudi national in an American flight school, say—while investigating terrorism. The section broadens the categories of institutions whose records and other “tangible items” the government may seek in espionage and terror cases, on the post-9/11 recognition that lawmakers cannot anticipate what sorts of organizations terrorists may exploit. In the past, it may have been enough to get hotel bills or storage-locker contracts (two of the four categories of records covered in the narrower law that section 215 replaced) to trace the steps of a Soviet spy; today, however, gumshoes may find they need receipts from scuba-diving schools or farm-supply stores to piece together a plot to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Section 215 removed the requirement that the records must concern an “agent of a foreign power” (generally, a spy or terrorist), since, again, the scope of an anti-terror investigation is hard to predict in advance.You continued:From this tiny acorn, Bush administration foes have conjured forth a mighty assault on the First Amendment. The ACLU warns that with section 215, “the FBI could spy on a person because they don’t like the books she reads, or because they don’t like the websites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy.” Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan calls section 215 “threatening.” And librarians, certain that the section is all about them, are scaring library users with signs warning that the government may spy on their reading habits.
These charges are nonsense. Critics of section 215 deliberately ignore the fact that any request for items under the section requires judicial approval. An FBI agent cannot simply walk into a flight school or library and demand records. The bureau must first convince the court that oversees anti-terror investigations (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, court) that the documents are relevant to protecting “against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” The chance that the FISA court will approve a 215 order because the FBI “doesn’t like the books [a person] reads . . . or because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy” is zero. If the bureau can show that someone using the Bucks County library computers to surf the web and send e-mails has traveled to Pakistan and was seen with other terror suspects in Virginia, on the other hand, then the court may well grant an order to get the library’s Internet logs.
Moreover, before the FBI can even approach the FISA court with any kind of request, agents must have gone through multiple levels of bureaucratic review just to open an anti-terror investigation. And to investigate a U.S. citizen (rather than an alien) under FISA, the FBI must show that he is knowingly engaged in terrorism or espionage.
Ignoring the Patriot Act’s strict judicial review requirements is the most common strategy of the act’s critics. Time and again, the Cassandras will hold up a section from the bill as an example of rampaging executive power—without ever mentioning that the power in question is overseen by federal judges who will allow its use only if the FBI can prove its relevance to a bona fide terror (or sometimes criminal) investigation. By contrast, in the few cases where a law enforcement power does not require judicial review, the jackboots-are-coming brigade screams for judges as the only trustworthy check on executive tyranny.
Strategy #2: Invent New Rights. A running theme of the campaign against section 215 and many other Patriot Act provisions is that they violate the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. But there is no Fourth Amendment privacy right in records or other items disclosed to third parties. A credit-card user, for example, reveals his purchases to the seller and to the credit-card company. He therefore has no privacy expectations in the record of those purchases that the Fourth Amendment would protect. As a result, the government, whether in a criminal case or a terror investigation, may seek his credit-card receipts without a traditional Fourth Amendment showing to a court that there is “probable cause” to believe that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Instead, terror investigators must convince the FISA court that the receipts are “relevant.”
Despite librarians’ fervent belief to the contrary, this analysis applies equally to library patrons’ book borrowing or Internet use. The government may obtain those records without violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights, because the patron has already revealed his borrowing and web browsing to library staff, other readers (in the days of handwritten book checkout cards), and Internet service providers. Tombstones declaring the death of the Fourth Amendment contain no truth whatsoever.
What’s different in the section 215 provision is that libraries or other organizations can’t challenge the FISA court’s order and can’t inform the target of the investigation, as they can in ordinary criminal proceedings. But that difference is crucial for the Justice Department’s war-making function. The department wants to know if an al-Qaida suspect has consulted maps of the Croton reservoir and researched the toxic capacities of cyanide in the New York Public Library not in order to win a conviction for poisoning New York’s water supply but to preempt the plot before it happens. The battleground is not the courtroom but the world beyond, where speed and secrecy can mean life or death.
Strategy #3: Demand Antiquated Laws. The librarians’ crusade against section 215 has drawn wide media attention and triggered an ongoing congressional battle, led by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, to pass a law purporting to protect the “Freedom to Read.” But the publicity that administration-hostile librarians were able to stir up pales in comparison to the clout of the Internet privacy lobby. The day the Patriot Act became law, the Center for Democracy and Technology sent around a warning that “privacy standards” had been “gutt[ed].” The Electronic Freedom Foundation declared that the “civil liberties of ordinary Americans have taken a tremendous blow.” Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic claimed that the law gave the government “essentially unlimited authority” to surveil Americans. The ACLU asserted that the FBI had suddenly gained “wide powers of phone and internet surveillance.” And the Washington Post editorialized that the act made it “easier” to wiretap by “lowering the standard of judicial review.”
The target of this ire? A section that merely updates existing law to modern technology. The government has long had the power to collect the numbers dialed from, or the incoming numbers to, a person’s telephone by showing a court that the information is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Just as in section 215 of the Patriot Act, this legal standard is lower than traditional Fourth Amendment “probable cause,” because the phone user has already forfeited any constitutional privacy rights he may have in his phone number or the number he calls by revealing them to the phone company.
A 1986 federal law tried to extend the procedures for collecting phone-number information to electronic communications, but it was so poorly drafted that its application to e-mail remained unclear. Section 216 of the Patriot Act resolves the ambiguity by making clear that the rules for obtaining phone numbers apply to incoming and outgoing e-mail addresses as well. The government can obtain e-mail headers—but not content—by showing a court that the information is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Contrary to cyber-libertarian howls, this is not a vast new power to spy but merely the logical extension of an existing power to a new form of communication. Nothing else has changed: the standard for obtaining information about the source or destination of a communication is the same as always."
"Section 218 allows them to search my home without accountability to the Department of Justice as long as they can allege that there is any foreign intelligence basis for the search."To the contrary, section 218 provides trivial changes to the FISA Act of 1978. The only change is that foreign intelligence or terrorism need only be "a significant purpose" of the investigation, as opposed to "the purpose". That's it. There is no change to the level of accountability. The following paragraph from the article above applies here as well:
"Ignoring the Patriot Act’s strict judicial review requirements is the most common strategy of the act’s critics. Time and again, the Cassandras will hold up a section from the bill as an example of rampaging executive power—without ever mentioning that the power in question is overseen by federal judges who will allow its use only if the FBI can prove its relevance to a bona fide terror (or sometimes criminal) investigation."
I'm not sure what I think about the Patriot Act right now, but I know I'll never be opposed to it. This morning in COM101, my teacher made a few comments about the negatives of the Patriot Act, and I tend to oppose his views on such things almost on principle. (Example: in the next breath, he said that the Gov. Bush files were archived in a private facility--which is an outright lie.)
And I just realized that makes no sense forever. I meant to say, "I'm not sure what I think about the Patriot Act right now, but I know I'll never be a vehement opponent of it." Call it a Freudian slip, perhaps.
Either way, I'm dropping out of this, considering that I probably look stupid enough as it is.
the wresting enthusiats(demos) would love it.. and other morons(voters) would salivate over it... and the republicans would posture over a 3 term prez(BILL) and get sidelined over leagalities..
Okay... I said I wouldn't post to this thread again, but... once again, that was sarcasm and hyperbole. :)
Although if I honestly believed that pure socialism was the only way we could keep Hillary out of the White House...
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