The Patriot Act and Privacy

I just heard Bob Barr, former Congressman from Georgia, on CNN saying that the government keeps saying to him that they cannot say whether, if we had the Patriot Act in effect on 9/11, if it could have prevented the attacks. He says without the ability to know it would have helped, there is certainly no reason to rule out the sunsetting of certain of its provisions this year or to allow the government to seek a massive expansion of the Patriot Act this year.

Good. I think most of us know the Patriot Act is bullshit and that is has been used primarily as a means to conduct surveillance operations on American citizens that have nothing to do with anti-terrorism efforts.

The way that James Sensenbrenner had his meltdown last Friday and unceremoniously ended the Dems attempts to hold hearings about the abuses of the Patriot Act while the president goes on more of his Bamboozlepalooza tours to argue for the PA's massive expansion shows how desperate the right is to shill for the Bushies when the PA harms rather than helps "freedom".

I also note this from David Sirota:

In a preview of the kind of gutsy moves he will take as a U.S. Senator, Vermont's Independent Congressman Bernie Sanders is preparing to offer an amendment today forcing the FBI to get a warrant before accessing citizens' reading habits at libraries and bookstore purchases. The USA Patriot Act allows the feds to do these kinds of searches with almost no judicial oversight - Sanders amendment would simply modify that specific provision to force more stringent checks on the federal government's power. Unfortunately, even though the President publicly says "there has got to be a certain sense of privacy," the White House is threatening to veto the bill if the amendment passes.

In 2003, Sanders and a bipartisan group of lawmakers tried to raise these same privacy concerns. The Justice Department opposed it, claimed "We're not going after the average American" and that "we respect the right to privacy" - and then refused to tell Congress how often it had used these new powers to secretly spy on people's reading habits. In fact, Judiciary Chairman Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) told the Associated Press "that the Justice Department was sharing so little information, he could not assess how the Patriot Act was working."

The numbers, however, have become clear. In a survey conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about 550 libraries across the country reported receiving requests over the past year from federal and local investigators for records of patrons. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft soon admitted that he had tripled the use of these secretive searches without warrants.