Sneaking Up On The Patriot Act

Hello everyone, it's September 16^th and I'm hanging out in beautiful Baja California, Mexico. It's fitting that on Mexican Independence Day I want to talk about the Patriot Act. Everyone here is celebrating like mad, think 4^th of July in the US with parades, fireworks and all – very patriotic.

I just came home from a short trip to California to see how the middle part of this North American continent lives. Yeah, that's right, when we Norte Americanos refer to ourselves as "Americans" we seem to have forgotten we share this continent with two other countries, Canada and Mexico, in case you didn't know.

Anyway, the news is still filled with the health care debate and the screaming and howling from those who are against the government stepping in. I still can't understand how a country this supposedly civilized can be so backward.

Let me leave this beaten to death topic with one thought. We are the ONLY major country on this planet that does not provide universal health care for their citizens. And, if the wing nuts have their way, we will continue to be. The rest of the world laughs at us…all the way to the hospital. As I read recently in a report, most countries think of universal health care as a right while we think of it as a business - we let companies profit off our illnesses.

But what I am really concerned with today is the Patriot Act. It has been kept mostly under the radar lately, maybe we are supposed to have forgotten about it.

The Obama administration is faced with the expiration of several parts of the Act at the end of this year. Mostly they deal with surveillance and getting into your life without the necessity of judicial review. President Obama , a constitutional attorney himself, has stated that legal institutions must be updated to deal with terror threats in a way to preserve the rule of law and accountability. But how about our civil rights?

Okay, that sounds very nice and interesting. What is the practice of this nice statement? The Administration wants to extend three parts of the Act that have to do with access to business records and roving wiretaps. Hmmmm, exactly what does this entail? Well, I did a little research.

The provisions that are to be extended deal with the following:

1. making business records open to allow government search of personal records of customers
   
2. permitting roving wiretaps and monitoring of personal international and other calls made by people with no known connections to foreign governments or links to terrorist groups without the requirement of first obtaining a court order, i.e. no judicial oversight.
   

The first part seems innocuous but in fact pertains to telephone calls, e-mail, website visits, health records, bank records and income tax records. That means that Uncle Sam can summarily and without provocation force a company to turn over their customers records. This gives government access to what websites you visit, what library books you take out, what you order from Amazon and when you go to the doctor. Hello? Doesn't that seem to violate your 4^th Amendment right to unreasonable search and seizure and your 5^th Amendment right to due process of law? Sure seems like it to me. But, once a law has been put in place, even though designed to be temporary, it is hard as hell to repeal or not permit it to be extended.

Sure, it was enacted to combat terrorism, but there is no reason the IRS can't use it to see if you are reporting everything you should be. Do you really want the government poking into your health records? What if you visited a psychiatrist, do you really want that known? There is no duty to keep the facts secret once they have peeked into your secret life. What if you visited all the sites for Chubby Gay lovers or S and M sites? Do you really want that known? Do you want someone poking into your e-mails to a dating service?

Then, the roving wiretaps have little or no oversight. You don't have to be suspected of anything to be a target. Maybe someone didn't like your suit, too Brooks Brothers for them. If they are government they can just poke about in your affairs for no better reason.

There was supposed to be Congressional oversight of these provisions, but in reality, it has been non-existent.

The American Bar Association wrote a letter to the President and members of Congress stating that there has been inadequate Congressional oversight of government investigations. Numerous violations of 1^st Amendment right to Free Speech, 4^th Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and 5^th Amendment right to due process have all occurred. When requests were made under the Freedom of Information Act for the FBI to provide documents resulting from these violations, Courts have ruled the FBI dragged their feet in supplying documentation.

The Patriot Act was signed into law forty-five days after 9/11. It was rammed down Congress' throat and in fact, was changed from the copy that was originally submitted to its members. Most of those who voted to enact it had never read it, or at least hadn't read the document they were voting on.

Now, the new administration wants to extend its provisions. This country has been operating since the beginning with a Bill of Rights, the first Amendments to the Constitution. These Amendments were what has set us apart as a nation, the rights that were given and secured to its citizens. Now these rights have been eroded and continue to be, both by the government and by the courts.

The Patriot Act has severely impinged on the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th Amendment, and the Supreme Court in 2005 took a major chunk out of the 5^th in Kelo v. City of New London. The provision in question was the right of citizens to own property – no taking of private property by eminent domain except for public benefit and then only with just compensation. In Kelo, non-blighted private property was seized by the City of New London under Eminent Domain and given to a developer for $1 a year for the sole purpose of increasing the municipal revenues.

So, think of your rights as a citizen and resident of the United States of America. In the last eight years you have had three of your basic rights taken from you. First under the Bush Administration, and now the new administration is trying to extend this rights grab. Think about it, why would the Obama Administration want to give back the right to have your records private? There is an awful lot a government can learn about you through business records. And today, information is power.

Forget about terrorism; think about your life and what you would like to keep secret. Are you such an open book that you would be happy to have everything out in the open? People have told me, let them look into my records, I have nothing to hide. Yeah, right!

I remember the days of good old Joe McCarthy and his witch hunting. Think what a field day he would have in today's world. Everyone was guilty by association in McCarthy's eyes. Under the Patriot Act your house can be broken into, your computer taken and searched without notice. Got anything on your address database you might not like someone to see? You might not even know that someone on your Act! Or Office address book has a third cousin married to the great grand niece of the brother-in-law of a terrorist in Saudi Arabia. Or maybe an old college pal has been making the odd trip to Pakistan ostensibly to buy artificial flowers wholesale and has stayed a bit longer than normal. Maybe he has a girlfriend stashed there he spends time with but the government might think he's going to an Al Qaida training camp. Under the McCarthy investigations, that would have been enough to brand you as a co-conspirator.

Sure, sounds extreme doesn't it? But in a nation so easily turned in any direction by fear, it can happen again in a heartbeat. After McCarthy, we were sure that sort of thing would never take place in the USA. We had learned our lesson. But sadly, my beloved country, like our last President, pays little attention to history. We go off half-cocked and do idiot things we might be sorry for later… like maybe invading Iraq.

So, we have given our government the tools of our own destruction in the Patriot Act, and our new President is in the process of extending these tools once more. Think about it and draw your own conclusions. I certainly have.