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Locobot : word.
I've been wanting to post that same thing, for a while now,but haven't had time to post until today. I think it's great to get an interview with one of the guys that wrote the legislation, but the fact that he's human and believes that the law is a good thing doesn't surprise me. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and all that. To me, it boils down to this:
People in law enforcement have wanted a lot of the expanded powers given in this legislation for a long time. They haven't been able to get it, because it violates due process, search and seizure, and a lot of other civil rights issues. It goes to the essence of "innocent until proven guilty." Now, suddenly we realize that we can't ignore terrorist threats anymore, and so the decision comes down, implicitly, that "all that seach and seizure and habeas corpus crap is fine and good for law-abiding American citizens, but we've got to have drastic measures to meet the drastic needs in these drastic times." Well, I don't much care for that, and would probably be against the Patriot Act, even if it wasn't intentionally written and being leveraged to allow these expanded powers to be applied in non-terrorist involved legal matters. Why? Because
1.) It presupposes that this type of expanded governmental power to encroach on the freedom of American citizens is necessary. I'm not convinced of this. We seem to have had plenty of information, and just no way of correctly analyzing it, added to a stigma that terrorism didn't happen on American soil.
2.) At the same time, I feel that it slaps down the notion that American Justice is different from many so-called barbaric justice systems around the world, because of the incredible freedom and number of rights afforded to American citizens. America is supposed to be a place where the little guy has a chance, and doesn't get pushed around by his government, and the government is accountable for its actions.
3.) We have no real mandate on how long the War on Terror is going to last, what the specific goals of this war are, and when we will know we have achieved whatever the goals are. What? Elminate terrorists, everywhere, through the entire friggin world? Seriously? O-bee-kay-bee. This isn't a War, it's a cultural movement. And along with this cultural movement, the government has a shitload of new powers, that it couldn't previously have. And we don't know when it will end, if ever . Fantastic.
Add that to the fact that this legislation isn't only being used on "terror" suspects, but can be used on anyone, and it scares my nards off. With that much power, with the strong intuition that there is a lot of corruption in the government and the Halls of Justice - no, I just don't trust it, nor do I care for the legislation that enable it.
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