Banach's actions were "foolhardy and negligent". They also arguably violated that particular part of the US code that was modified by the patriot act.
That paticular code desn't have anything to do with domestic surveilence and the restrictions placed on domestic surveilence it. There is no requirement that the person being charged be tied to international terrorism.
There is no requirement to show that the person being charged under that section of law is an agent of a foreign power or involved in international terrorism.
You can debate if his foolhardy action rose to the level of offense described in that section of the law, but this has nothing to do with the federal government gathering domestic intelligence information.
"An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people, not 200, as officials have implied, were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security."
So a considerable percentage were convicted of making flase statements during an investigation into suspected terrorism activities, or were found to have broken immigration laws rather than being charged with specificaly conspiring to perform a terrorist act, which is much more difficult to prove.
The Justice department spun things in a favorable light. The Washington Post spun things the opposite way.
No evidence off abuse of the Patriot Act mentioned.
Treasury Department figures reviewed by Newsweek show that this year the Feds have used the Patriot Act to conduct searches on 962 suspects, yielding "hits" on 6,397 financial records. Of those, two thirds (4,261) were in money-laundering cases with no terror connection. Among the agencies making requests, Newsweek has learned, were the IRS (which investigates tax fraud), the Postal Service (postal fraud) and the Secret Service counterfeiting). One request came from the Agriculture Department -- a case that apparently involved food stamp fraud.
Newsweek is not a reliable source for unbiased information.
The patriot act doesn't even claim that it's provisions related to money laundering are limited to terrorism.
Read the part on money laundering and it's purposes in section 302 of the Patriot Act.
The portions of the Patriot Act related to domestic survielence do require that the person who is the target of the survielence be involved with international terrorism or be an agent of a foreign power. The money laundering portions do not.
Fighting money laundering, even if it isn't related to terrorism is a stated goal of the Patriot Act.
Fighting money laundering not related to terrorism isn't an abus of the Patriot Act, it's using it as it was explicitly intended.
There are portions of the Patriot Act that apply even if the suspect is not involved in terrorism. When congress was attempting to combat terroists use of money laundering, they also gave the government more power to go after other money laundering. This isn't some streching of the law in a way that wasn't intended. This is explicitly mentioned in the bill where it decribes the purpose of that section.
And that's another of my objections. The PA was sold to the public to protect us from terrorists, when in fact it was a general prosecutorial wish list that never would have been passed at any other time.
So, in other words, the apologists claiming it's all about "fighting terrorists" are full of it.
This is RICO II. Sold to the American people as a tool to fight organized crime, and later used to persecute peaceful pro-life protestors.
You say that as if it were a GOOD thing, as if losing my privacy in banking transactions (amongst many other things) just so FedGov can go fishing any time it wants to is actually laudable. If you think that, you are a candidate for tyrant-wannabe of the YEAR. Along with Dubya, who is calling for more of the same. Go find another country, one with NO Constitution to get in your way, where EVERYONE thinks that a Constitution is just a G.D. piece of paper. Not here, not in MY country. I would guess that not only are you an untrained skeptic, but equally untrained in what the Founding Dads were trying to hand over to us, if we only had the will to KEEP it.