• The
USA Patriot Act gives the government broad powers to
secretly collect information (like medical, travel,
hotel, library or financial records) about innocent
Americans without probable cause.
• The law contains “sunset” provisions,
under which certain sections expire by the end of 2005
unless Congress chooses to renew them.
• Some in Congress want to make the entire
law permanent and expand
it to give federal agents
even broader access to our personal records.
Regardless of how you come
down on the Patriot Act, you have to admit one thing: The Constitution
is always more vulnerable when our national security
is in danger.
• During World War II, for instance, our government
locked up 125,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens based only on their race, even though the vast
majority were loyal to the United States.
• During
the Cold War, the witch hunts of Senator Joe
McCarthy and others used guilt by association
to attack innocent people and chill
the exercise of civil liberties.
• The
Patriot Act and similar policies are more subtle
than the Japanese internments and McCarthy's
tactics, but no less dangerous. By law, they
give the White House a lot more power at the
expense of Congress and the courts and undermine
the structural checks and balances intended
to safeguard our liberty.
• It
is an American tradition dating back to our
founding to have a healthy
skepticism of too much concentrated or unchecked
power in the hands
of any person. |
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We need to make modest
changes to the
Patriot Act to keep us both safe and free. We need to make sure that these extraordinary powers
are focused on preventing terrorism, not on secretly
searching the records of ordinary Americans.
Two examples of what we need
to fix:
• Section 213 expands the government's
ability to conduct secret searches of your home or
office. Agents can get a “sneak and peek” warrant,
which allows them to break into your home, search your
things, take DNA swabs, download files from your computer
and even seize property—all without telling you for
an indefinite period of time.
• Section
215 allows the government to
use secret spy-hunting powers to seize the hotel, library,
medical or other personal
records of ordinary Americans without probable cause or
based on a rubber-stamp court order that the judge
cannot deny. If served with one of these orders, a
hotel manager, librarian or doctor could go to jail
if they tell anybody anything about it.
• “It's a free country!” is
more than just a punch line. America is the freest nation in the world.
Whether you're from a “blue” state or a “red” one,
we all share certain universal values, like fairness,
equality and a belief in the importance of checks and
balances on government power.
• The
Patriot Act threatens these values. That's
why people from both ends of the political spectrum
are joining forces to hold Congress's feet to the fire,
to force our elected representatives to take a sober
second look at the Patriot Act four years after September
11, 2001.
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