Published on Friday, November 9, 2001
The New USA PATRIOT Act
Sub Tittle: The Cornerstone of American Freedom.
Are You a Patriot?
by John Kaminski
The USA Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has eliminated
the Constitutional guarantee of probable cause when investigating a
crime, and now allows the police - at any time and for any reason - to
enter and search your house, your files, your bank account - and not
even tell you about it.
Are you a patriot? Well, the fact of the matter is, you are whether you
want to be or not. But are you an American or a mindless corporate
stooge? Well, that's another question.
The recent passage and signing of the Patriot Act has effectively
nullified at least six amendments of the Bill of Rights addendum to the
U.S. Constitution. As a result of this, America is longer America, but a
police state, pure and simple. This Patriot Bill is, in fact, a massive
violation of the Constitution it purports to uphold and improve.
Among other things, it mandates that judges give police search warrants
when they ask for them, for any reason. In fact, judges can't deny these
warrants to police, because police don't need a stated reason to ask for
them.
The Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of American freedom. During the
debates on the adoption of the Constitution in the 1790s, its opponents
repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way
to tyranny by the central government. Many states would not have signed
the original Constitution without knowing that these amendments would be
added, according to the federal website which displays the Constitution.
These amendments became known as the Bill of Rights, which Americans
have cherished, protected and fought for for over 200 years.
The Patriot Act rushed through Congress and signed by President George
W. Bush is a major step toward a totalitarian state in which individual
liberty is crushed by the whim of police and corporate demagogues
masquerading as patriots.
The Patriot Act:
* Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, right
to peaceably assemble provision, and petition the government for redress
of grievances provision; it violates the First Amendment to the
Constitution three times. More on this below.
* Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in
astonishingly major and repeated ways. The Fourth Amendment to the
Constitution reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons of things to be
seized." The Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has
revoked the necessity for probable cause, and now allows the police, at
any time and for any reason, to enter and search your house - and not
even tell you about it.
* Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite
incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney General to
be threats to national security. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no
person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due
process of law, and the Patriot Act does away with due process. It even
allows people to be kept in prison for life without even a trial.
* Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy
and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.
* Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).
* Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction).
Most of the following information is taken from the ACLU's written
objections to Congress before and after the passage of the Patriot Act.
My comments are in brackets [].
The Patriot Act does the following (I'm putting the immigration stuff at
the bottom because that least affects most of the people who will be
reading this):
* [It keeps judges out of the process and lets cops do what they
want (cops meaning FBI, CIA, etc.)] It minimizes judicial supervision of
telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities in
anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations
unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism - that means anything.
How long do you think before that includes political dissent? Oops, too
late, that's already happened.]
* It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret
searches - again in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine
criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism
- that means anything they want it to mean. If we don't agree with Nazi
Republican ideas, they can now arrest us.]
* It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the
power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block
any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Under
this provision the payment of membership dues is a deportable offense.
[That means, among other things, that Bush and Ashcroft can decide
Greenpeace and Ralph Nader are terrorists, and under this law, it can
put them in jail.]
* It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial,
mental health, and educational records about individuals without having
to show evidence of a crime and without a court order. [It means they
can do what they want for no good reason, except to persecute and
imprison people with humanistic, noncorporate rip-off views.]
* It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens
for "intelligence" purposes and use of intelligence authorities to
by-pass probable cause requirements in criminal cases. [Bye bye peace
movement. You're all going to jail; me too.]
* It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the
business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central
Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence
surveillance in the United States. [This is what America worked so hard
for all those years to eliminate.]
* It allows searches of highly personal financial records without
notice and without judicial review based on a very low standard that
does not require probable cause of a crime or even relevancy to an
ongoing terrorism investigation. [They can do any of this stuff without
any reason whatsoever. This is the kind of freedom these fascists always
wanted - freedom to put everyone who disagrees with them in jail.]
* It creates a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that
could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and
subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties. [This means they can
jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in jail for life
without a trial.]
On immigration specifically, the new law permits the detention of
non-citizens facing deportation based merely on the Attorney General's
certification that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" the
non-citizen endangers national security. While immigration or criminal
charges must be filed within seven days, these charges need not have
anything to do with terrorism, but can be minor visa violations of the
kind that normally would not result in detention at all. Non-citizens
ordered removed on visa violations could be indefinitely detained if
they are stateless, their country of origin refuses to accept them, or
they are granted relief from deportation because they would be tortured
if they were returned to their country of origin.
It permits the Attorney General to indefinitely incarcerate or detain
non-citizens based on mere suspicion, and to deny readmission to the
United States of non-citizens (including lawful permanent residents) for
engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. [Or, what used to
be the First Amendment. Now, it doesn't exist.]
Let me just take a bit more of your valuable time to make a couple of
points crystal clear, again using material from the ACLU's objections to
passage of the Patriot Act.
Wiretapping and Intelligence Surveillance
The wiretapping and intelligence provisions in the USA Patriot Act sound
two themes: they minimize the role of a judge in ensuring that law
enforcement wiretapping is conducted legally and with proper
justification, and they permit use of intelligence investigative
authority to by-pass normal criminal procedures that protect privacy.
Specifically:
1. The USA Patriot Act allows the government to use its intelligence
gathering power to circumvent the standard that must be met for criminal
wiretaps. Currently FISA surveillance, which does not contain many of
the same checks and balances that govern wiretaps for criminal purposes,
can be used only when foreign intelligence gathering is the primary
purpose. The new law allows use of FISA surveillance authority even if
the primary purpose were a criminal investigation. Intelligence
surveillance merely needs to be only a "significant" purpose. This
provision authorizes unconstitutional physical searches and wiretaps:
though it is searching primarily for evidence of crime, law enforcement
conducts a search without probable cause of crime.
2. The USA Patriot Act extends a very low threshold of proof for access
to Internet communications that are far more revealing than numbers
dialed on a phone. Under current law, a law enforcement agent can get a
pen register or trap and trace order requiring the telephone company to
reveal the numbers dialed to and from a particular phone. To get such an
order, law enforcement must simply certify to a judge - who must grant
the order - that the information to be obtained is "relevant to an
ongoing criminal investigation." This is a very low level of proof, far
less than probable cause. This provision apparently applies to law
enforcement efforts to determine what websites a person had visited,
which is like giving law enforcement the power - based only on its own
certification - to require the librarian to report on the books you had
perused while visiting the public library. This provision extends a low
standard of proof - far less than probable cause - to actual "content"
information.
3. In allowing for "nationwide service" of pen register and trap and
trace orders, the law further marginalizes the role of the judiciary. It
authorizes what would be the equivalent of a blank warrant in the
physical world: the court issues the order, and the law enforcement
agent fills in the places to be searched. This is not consistent with
the important Fourth Amendment privacy protection of requiring that
warrants specify the place to be searched. Under this legislation, a
judge is unable to meaningfully monitor the extent to which her order
was being used to access information about Internet communications.
4. The Act also grants the FBI broad access in "intelligence"
investigations to records about a person maintained by a business. The
FBI need only certify to a court that it is conducting an intelligence
investigation and that the records it seeks may be relevant. With this
new power, the FBI can force a business to turn over a person's
educational, medical, financial, mental health and travel records based
on a very low standard of proof and without meaningful judicial
oversight.
The ACLU noted that the FBI already had broad authority to monitor
telephone and Internet communications. Most of the changes apply not
just to surveillance of terrorists, but instead to all surveillance in
the United States. [All surveillance. The WTO geeks will love this one.
Now we can be just like China.]
Law enforcement authorities -- even when they are required to obtain
court orders - have great leeway under current law to investigate
suspects in terrorist attacks. Current law already provided, for
example, that wiretaps can be obtained for the crimes involved in
terrorist attacks, including destruction of aircraft and aircraft
piracy.
The FBI also already had authority to intercept these communications
without showing probable cause of crime for "intelligence" purposes
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, FISA wiretaps
now exceed wiretapping for all domestic criminal investigations. The
standards for obtaining a FISA wiretap are lower than the standards for
obtaining a criminal wiretap.
Criminal Justice
The law dramatically expands the use of secret searches. Normally, a
person is notified when law enforcement conducts a search. In some cases
regarding searches for electronic information, law enforcement
authorities can get court permission to delay notification of a search.
The USA Patriot Act extends the authority of the government to request
"secret searches" to every criminal case. This vast expansion of power
goes far beyond anything necessary to conduct terrorism investigations.
The Act also allows for the broad sharing of sensitive information in
criminal cases with intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the NSA,
the INS and the Secret Service. It permits sharing of sensitive grand
jury and wiretap information without judicial review or any safeguards
regarding the future use or dissemination of such information.
These information sharing authorizations and mandates effectively put
the CIA back in the business of spying on Americans: Once the CIA makes
clear the kind of information it seeks, law enforcement agencies can use
tools like wiretaps and intelligence searches to provide data to the
CIA. In fact, the law specifically gives the Director of Central
Intelligence - who heads the CIA -- the power to identify domestic
intelligence requirements.
The law also creates a new crime of "domestic terrorism." The new
offense threatens to transform protesters into terrorists if they engage
in conduct that "involves acts dangerous to human life." Members of
Operation Rescue, the Environmental Liberation Front and Greenpeace, for
example, have all engaged in activities that could subject them to
prosecution as terrorists. Then, under this law, the dominos begin to
fall. Those who provide lodging or other assistance to these "domestic
terrorists" could have their homes wiretapped and could be prosecuted.
[If you have any doubt that these are the trappings of a police state,
then you need to go back to elementary school and read about the
Constitution, which we no longer have.]
[Fox News Channel reports tonight that 90% of the American people are
really happy with what Bush has done. I think somebody wrote this all in
a book once, that when a free people gave away their freedom, they did
it happily and with much fanfare.]
John Kaminski live in Englewood Florida. E-mail: skylax@home.com
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