The U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in New York, the United States Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001. Several sections of the USA Patriot Act directly threaten the civil liberties of the citizens of the United States.

The constitutionality of several parts of the law has been questioned because it appears to infringe on many amendments directly related to civil liberties. The USA Patriot Act could also possibly be used as a stepping stone for more invasive spying measures and consequently a loss of civil liberties, and the destruction of the free American society. The act is an abomination of the principles of foundation upon which the United States was built, for the following reasons.

The USA Patriot Act was introduced into Congress on October 23, 2001. Over the course of three days, with a minimum of debate and the admission that several members of Congress did not even read the bill, it passed the House with a vote of 357-66 and the Senate with a vote of 98-1 and became law on October 26, 2001. Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, was the only Senator to vote against the provisions of the bill due primarily to discord with issues of civil liberty, including the provisions surrounding the wiretapping of citizens, the searching of business records, and the search and seizure law revisions, among others.

Section 215 of the act, "Access to records and other items under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," is particularly abrasive in terms of a negative impact on civil liberties. According to this section, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has the power to command any person or entity to relinquish "any tangible things" if the organization suspects the item(s) to be related to terrorism in any way and subsequently conduct an investigation. The FBI bears no restriction when desiring to engage in spying on private citizen records such as telephone calls or online communication, in the sense that they do not have to provide a reason for invading the privacy of those they are supposed to protect.

People believed to have conducted illegal activities that are discovered by the government under the terms of Section 215 are forbidden from speaking about their interaction with the government. The reason for this secrecy is not clearly defined, though one might suppose that the FBI desires to extend its power as far as possible while maintaining that they have done nothing illegal or contrary to the U.S. Constitution, upon whose principles this nation was founded.

If the government merely observes someone and does not act upon the provisions of the section, they are not even required to notify the citizen of their actions. Section 215 severely violates the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment, which elicits the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by requiring a warrant for search and probable cause. The Fifth Amendment is also broken because of a "depriv
The act also permits the FBI to violate the First Amendment in that a person's library borrowing records can be searched, and any websites viewed on public access terminals by a person can potentially subject him to an investigation of which he has no knowledge. One can easily conclude that Section 215 completely fails to accomplish what the title of the act implies, particularly to "Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," though it seems rather adept at trying to instill fear into the American public. Civil liberty implies freedom of expression, but a fear of the government destroys this freedom because one becomes afraid to articulate his beliefs.

Civil liberties are further eradicated in Section 209, "Seizure of voice mail messages pursuant to warrants." Under normal circumstances the government must obtain a Title III warrant in order to receive copies of voicemail messages from service providers that the intended recipient has not yet heard. Section 209 therefore allows the federal government to acquire these communications without a warrant, which is clearly an obstruction of privacy because the progenitors of the conversation do not even have had to commit a crime or even been planning to commit a crime.

This section of the USA Patriot Act doles out unrestricted power to federal agencies in terms of accessing communication logs that should remain private unless the individual they have singled out and decided to spy on is actually suspect of illegal acts. Phone calls are a significant mode of communication and voicemails tend to reveal plenty of information, often times about both the caller and the intended recipient. For example, a person usually describes their current location, time and date of the call, and several other important bits of information that the government can use to pinpoint exactly what someone is doing and when they are doing it.

The government does not need this much information on innocent people, they simply "want" it. Though it makes sense that the more information you have concerning a particular situation, the more likely it is that you will be able to act in a decent manner to resolve whatever problem, it is wholly unnecessary to have so much background information on innocent citizens. This appears to foreshadow the eventual requirement that every person with feet planted on United States soil at any time must have on their person a national identification card with surely a pointless abundance of personal information that does not need to become public information. The USA Patriot Act just brings the nation as a whole one step closer to this reality, which would cast our civil liberties behind an impenetrable wall through which they could not escape, while we suffer on the other side, possibly to the point that we cower with fear.

The USA Patriot Act also gives the government the ability to peruse financial, student, and medical records without jumping through many of the hoops that a warrant for that information would require. The government does not need to pry into a person's financial life, though they do in fact already have an agency that gathers all of the information they could possibly need for anything useful, called the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

No good reason exists for the inclusion of this provision in the law because it does almost nothing to combat terrorism as the rather lengthy name of the act suggests. Even more obscure is the need for student records, unless the government just needs to know who is training to learn how to fly planes through courses at colleges and private universities, in case they would like to spy on "potential" terrorists. Apparently, this means that a person cannot solely want to learn how to fly, surely they must be intending to engage in terrorism, at least in the eyes of the government.

As for the medical records, those appear to be totally uncalled for. A person's health is, in all respects, entirely irrelevant to terrorist activity. The information could serve no possible use for the government because of its lack of relation to the goals of the act. The primary goal of the act in fact seems to be the desire to spy on citizens of the United States as if they are the culprits behind most of the terrorist acts that occur within this country.

Assuming an even distribution of terrorism across the globe, particularly in industrial societies, one can easily conclude that most terrorist threats will originate outside of the United States. The United States is only one country, and there are almost three hundred other nations on the planet, and it would be naïve to believe that not all of those nations harbor at least one dangerous person. Therefore, more focus needs to be placed on solving international disputes and forming friendlier alliances with nations that we perhaps do not understand as well as we should, rather than the government diverting all of its attention to its own people, and thereby stripping them of a great deal of civil liberties.

The executive branch of the federal government has also been hiding court hearings centered on the issue of immigration. In fact, the courts are not even allowed to admit that the secret hearings exist. Any immigrants detained after September 11, 2001 essentially become missing persons. They are held indefinitely in federal custody without reason and due process of law when no charges have even been filed against them.

The government resists informing anyone on the names and locations of the people that have been detained in what is clearly an unconstitutional manner. Immigrants are often citizens of the United States as well, and deserve to be treated as if they were a part of the country. To detain someone without due process of law and probable cause certainly violates The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The above points visibly demonstrate that the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001 crosses several lines in terms of civil liberties, in the sense that it is eliminating them, slowly but surely. As citizens of the United States, we are guaranteed the rights set forth in the United States Constitution, and the only legal documentation that can invalidate those are amendments to the Constitution, not a law that is passed three days after it was introduced with what was almost a total lack of analysis of the bill before President George W. Bush signed it.

From wiretapping to illegally detaining citizens, the negative impact of the USA Patriot Act on civil liberties has been great. This legislature has dealt a huge blow to the premise that human beings should be able to live freely and not worry that the government is spying and carefully documenting and analyzing every move they make.

This is not the kind of world in which anyone would desire to live, unless of course they were politically corrupt as a majority of the federal government that deals with this law seems to be, in which case this would be a wonderful place to be. The notions behind the USA Patriot Act are simply ridiculous, and are entirely antithetical to the notions of civil liberty.

Sources

American Civil Liberties Union, 12 November, 2007 http://www.aclu.org/safefree/resources/17343res20031114.html
American Civil Liberties Union, 17 November, 2007 http://www.aclu.org/takeaction/general/18880pub20030211.html
American Civil Liberties Union, 12 November, 2007 http://www.aclu.org/safefree/resources/17381res20030402.html
American Civil Liberties Union, 12 November, 2007 http://action.aclu.org/reformthepatriotact/215.html
Migration Information Source 14 November, 2007 http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=46