It's always good to see the personalities behind the legislation. The Patriot Act is not simple legislation, there are aspects of it that are not as bad as we thought, better than we thought and worse than we thought. It's an understatement that the law is very much a work in progress.
Personally, I got a lot out of a rather even-handed recent feature on Ashcroft and the <i>Patriot Act</i> in this April's <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>.
These three paragraphs extracted detail some of the better and worse aspects of the <i>Patriot Act</i>, as well as the proposed <i>SAFE Act</i> - a bipartisan legislative response to nanofever's desire for specific safeguards.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/04/rosen.htm
Quote:
...I suppose I qualify as a [policy] junkie of sorts, having written about different aspects of the act for the past two years. But it wasn't until I taught it in a law-school seminar devoted to the balance between liberty and security that I felt knowledgeable enough about its technical details to form a relatively informed opinion. Based on that seminar, I've concluded that some criticism of the act is overblown. "Roving wiretaps," for example, which allow investigators to tap every electronic device a suspect uses, have long been available for drug and racketeering investigations; the Patriot Act corrects an inadvertent gap in the law that denied these wiretaps for investigations of suspected terrorists. (Orin Kerr, a scholar of cyberspace and a law professor at George Washington University, has argued that parts of the Patriot Act actually expand the protection of privacy—by applying to previously unregulated Internet surveillance the same standards that have been applied to searches involving the telephone and regular mail.)
Other parts of the act are more troubling. The most controversial provisions vastly expand the government's authority to search private records and other personal data without notifying a suspect. Before passage of the act the government could search certain personal records—including hotel, airline, and car-rental records—if it could provide evidence to suggest that the records were those of a spy or terrorist. The Patriot Act extended the government's reach to include all tangible information, such as bookstore receipts and library records; the government need not tell the targets their records are being searched, and the record keepers are not allowed to. Worse, under the act the government no longer need certify in advance that its target is a suspected spy or terrorist. Now government agents can simply assert that the records they seek are "relevant" to an ongoing terrorism investigation. In theory, an unscrupulous Attorney General who wanted to intimidate his opponents could certify that their medical, bank, and Internet records were relevant to a terrorist investigation—just as Richard Nixon retaliated against Vietnam War critics by scouring their tax returns. Banks and doctors and Internet-service providers would be compelled to turn over the critics' data—but prohibited from telling the critics that their records were being searched. And if the Attorney General found evidence of low-level crimes (say, minor financial misdoing), he could threaten prosecution.
This is the essence of the case offered against the Patriot Act by its most thoughtful opponents. As the lone senator to vote against the act two years ago, Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, warned that it could be used to prosecute low-level crimes that had nothing to do with terrorism. Today Feingold believes that his fears have been vindicated. "I'm confident that the Department of Justice and the Administration are going too far," he told me not long ago. "A compelling case in The New York Times laid out the fact that the USA Patriot Act is being used in a wide number of regular criminal cases ... and to me that's an abuse." To protect citizens from potential abuses, Feingold and other Democrats have joined an array of Republican colleagues to introduce the Security and Freedom Ensured Act of 2003. The SAFE Act would resurrect the requirement that evidence of espionage or terrorism be provided in advance of secret searches. Ashcroft's fall tour was undertaken in direct response to Republican critics, such as Butch Otter, a congressman from Idaho, who persuaded the House in July to vote to repeal the so-called sneak-and-peek provisions of the Patriot Act, which expanded the use of secret searches. Ashcroft worried that critics of the act were defining the debate about civil liberties in ways that could damage the Bush Administration. Feingold said to me, "I believe Ashcroft was told by the White House that the Patriot Act was causing significant political problems for the President on his conservative, right flank. I think they told Ashcroft, 'You have credibility in the country; you have to sell this thing.'"...
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Now, it's very difficult to get info on the exact status of the <i>SAFE Act</i> at this very minute. It's probably in a classic legislative limbo. I do know Bush was threatening to <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/29/154017.shtml">veto</a> it back in January but I don't know its current chances of passing.
I think it would be a constructive thing to watch this legislation closely and voice support for it; rather than merely voicing opposition to the <i>Patriot Act</i>.