i happen to agree with heather macdonald's testimony about the patriot act where she posits that NOT ONE case of abuse of privacy rights has been brought forward...you can speculateall you want about potential future abuses, but the fact is we just don't have any....the slippery slope of abuse as she points out in her testimony runs the other way..
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btw...her testimony is an excellent read, i would highly recommend reading the entirety...
and one last thought...
i just heard cavuto say in his closing minute, while considering the NSA scanning patterns of phone calls...
he said words to the effect...
' i would rather them sift and scan the remains of my phone calls than sift through my remains'
i agree with him
if anyone can prevent another hellacious attack such as 9/11 by doing something as simple as computerized scanning of phone records looking for patterns of phone calls to *known* al quaeda suspects, i'm for it
manhattan-institute.org
--Strategy #3: Conceal Legal Precedent.
Attacks on the other most controversial section of the Patriot Act, section 213, illustrate the key ruse of concealing the act’s legal precedents. Section 213 allows the government to delay notice of a search, something criminal investigators have been allowed to do for decades.
Say the FBI wants to plumb Mohammad Atta's hard drive for evidence of a nascent terror attack. If a federal agent shows up at his door and says: "Mr. Atta, we have a search warrant for your hard drive, which we suspect contains information about the structure and purpose of your cell," Atta will tell his cronies back in Hamburg and Afghanistan: "They're on to us; destroy your files — and the infidel who sold us out." The government's ability to plot out that branch of Al Qaeda is finished.
To avoid torpedoing preemptive investigations, Section 213 lets the government ask a judge for permission to delay notice of a search. The judge can grant the request only if he finds “reasonable cause” to believe that notice would result in death or physical harm to an individual, flight from prosecution, evidence tampering, witness intimidation, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation. In the case of Mohammad Atta’s hard drive, the judge will likely allow a delay, since notice could seriously jeopardize the investigation, and would likely result in evidence tampering or witness intimidation.
The government can delay notifying the subject only for a "reasonable" period of time; eventually officials must tell Atta that they inspected his hard drive.
Section 213 carefully balances traditional expectations of notice and the imperatives of preemptive terror and crime investigations. That’s not how left- and right-wing libertarians have portrayed it, however. They present Section 213, which they have dubbed “sneak-and-peek,” as one of the most outrageous new powers seized by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. The ACLU’s fund-raising pitches warn: “Now, the government can secretly enter your home while you’re away . . . rifle through your personal belongings . . . download your computer files . . . and seize any items at will. . . . And, because of the Patriot Act, you may never know what the government has done.”
Notice the ACLU’s “Now.” Like every anti-213 crusader, the ACLU implies that section 213 is a radical new power. This charge is a rank fabrication. For decades, federal courts have allowed investigators to delay notice of a search in drug cases, organized crime, and child pornography, for the same reasons as in section 213. Indeed, the ability to delay notice of a search is an almost inevitable concomitant of investigations that seek to stop a crime before it happens. But the lack of precise uniformity in the court rulings on delayed notice slowed down complex national terror cases. Section 213 codified existing case law under a single national standard to streamline detective work; it did not create new authority regarding searches. Those critics who believe that the target of a search should always be notified prior to the search, regardless of the risks, should have raised their complaints decades ago--to the Supreme Court and the many other courts who have recognized the necessity of a delay option.
Critics of Section 213 raise the spectre of widespread surveillance abuse should the government be allowed to delay notice. FBI agents will be rummaging around the effects of law-abiding citizens on mere whim, even stealing from them, allege the anti-Patriot propagandists. But the government has had the delayed notice power for decades, and the anti-Patriot demagogues have not brought forward a single case of abuse under delayed notice case law. Their argument against Section 213 remains purely speculative: It could be abused. But there's no need to speculate; the historical record refutes the claim.
Moreover, such wild charges against Section 213 “hide the judge.” It is a federal judge who decides whether a delay is reasonable, not law enforcement officials. And before a government agent can even seek to delay notice of a search, he must already have proven to a judge that he has probable cause to conduct the search in the first place. This is hardly a recipe for lawless executive behavior—unless the anti-Patriot forces are also alleging that the federal judiciary is determined to violate citizens rights. If that’s what they mean, they should come out and say it.
In fact, the recent history of government intelligence-gathering belies the notion that any government surveillance power sets us on a slippery slope to tyranny. There is a slippery-slope problem in terror investigations — but it runs the other way. Since the 1970s, libertarians of all political stripes have piled restriction after restriction on intelligence-gathering, even preventing two anti-terror FBI agents in the same office from collaborating on a case if one was an "intelligence" investigator and the other a "criminal" investigator. By the late '90s, the bureau worried more about avoiding a pseudo-civil liberties scandal than about preventing a terror attack. No one demanding the ever-more Byzantine protections against hypothetical abuse asked whether they were exacting a cost in public safety. We know now that they were.
The libertarian certainty about looming government abuse is a healthy instinct; it animates the Constitution. But critics of the Patriot Act and other anti-terror authorities ignore the sea change in law enforcement culture over the last several decades. For privacy fanatics, it’s always 1968, when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was voraciously surveilling political activists with no check on its power. That FBI is dead and gone. In its place arose a risk-averse and overwhelmingly law-abiding Bureau, that has internalized the norms of restraint and respect for privacy.
This respect for the law now characterizes intelligence agencies across the board. Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, the nominee for Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, told this committee last week that the challenge for supervisors in the National Security Agency was persuading analysts to use all of their legal powers, not to pull analysts back from an abuse of those powers.
It is because of this sea-change in law enforcement culture that Patriot Act critics cannot point to a single abuse of the act over the last four years, and why they are always left to argue in the hypothetical. |
