Patriot Act: The USA Patriot

Patriot Act:

The USA Patriot Act, which is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, was enacted, by the United States Congress, following the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

The Patriot Act focuses on terrorism, defining it as activity that:

Intimidates or coerces the government or civil population

Breaks criminal laws

And, endangers human life ("The Patriot Act")

Since its enactment, according to John Ashcroft's 2004 report entitled the Department of Justice: Working to Keep America Safer, there have been 368 individuals criminally charged in terrorism investigations. Of these charges, 195 resulted in convictions or guilty pleas. President Bush confirmed these statistics in June of 2005, stating that terrorism investigations had accounted for more than 400 charges, of which more than half resulted in convictions or guilty pleas ("The Patriot Act").

The Patriot Act gets its beginnings back in the 1960s and 1970s, with the perceived abuse of power by the CIA and the FBI. "In 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed to produce legal guidelines for federal investigations" ("The Patriot Act").

The FISA defined how investigations could be performed. In addition, it also defined who could be investigated. An individual had to be suspected o crimes such as espionage or international terrorism, considered crimes against the government, or crimes against society, such as: drug trafficking or money laundering, to be investigated ("The Patriot Act").

The terrorist attacks on September 11th were blamed on the failure of investigations with the CIA and the FBI. It was discovered that the FISA was too narrow, and didn't allow for the agencies to investigate the terrorists as effectively as they could have. As such, the Patriot Act was passed to correct this oversight, redefining terrorism as a much broader concept ("The Patriot Act").

The Patriot Act as a Violation of Civil Rights and Constitutional Amendments:

Since the beginning, there have been critics of the Patriot Act. These critics believe that not only is the Act unnecessary, but that it also allows law enforcement to infringe on citizen's basic civil rights and violates Constitutional amendments. These include: free-speech, freedom of the press, human rights, and the right to privacy ("The Patriot Act").

The provisions in the Patriot Act that allow Sneak-and-Peek search is one of the major civil rights challenges. Provision 213 authorizes "surreptitious search warrants and seizures upon a showing of reasonable necessity and eliminates the requirement of Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that immediate notification of seized items be provided" (qtd. In "The Patriot Act"). In addition, the owner of the property doesn't even have to be informed of the search. Items like phone records can be retrieved, without ever notifying the individual.

The ACLU has stated that they believe that the Justice Department has mislead Americans into the true nature of the Patriot Act. This is in response to a website that was created by the Justice Department, in 2003.

The ACLU, in their report, notes that despite the DOJ's claim that the Patriot Act can only be used to obtain business records, via Section 215, that in fact, the FBI can obtain 'any tangible thing'. These include "books, letters, diaries, library records, medical and psychiatric records, financial information, membership lists of religious institutions, and even -- as Attorney General Ashcroft himself conceded in testimony before Congress -- genetic information" ("ACLU").

A real life example of how an innocent individual's civil rights can be so easily violated was presented by Jason Halperin's account, in his article Patriot Raid. Halperin had gone with his roommate to see the Broadway show Rent. Before heading to the musical, the two men decided to stop at a favorite Indian restaurant, in the heart of midtown New York, just off Times Square. They had just begun to eat dinner when five NYPD officers, in bulletproof vests, stormed into the restaurant, guns drawn and pointing at the customers and the restaurant staff.

Halperin further goes on to tell of how the police officers had all of the terrified patrons and staff go to the back of the restaurant, making the kitchen staff crawl out on their hands and knees. Everyone was patted down while ten more officers entered while some of the original officers searched the restaurant for other people in the facility. Two of the new officers approached Halperin and identified themselves as officers of the INS and Homeland Security Department.

When asked why he was being held, when he was just there to eat dinner, Halperin was told that they would be released after it was confirmed that he had no outstanding warrants and that his immigration status was OK'd.