The Patriot Act and Our Civil Liberties

In a letter to Senators Leahy and Specter of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales disclosed this week that the Bush Administration will cease its practice of using warrantless wiretaps on the communications of people expected of ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Instead, the Administration will go through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1970 to review requests for warrants to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

Although surprising, this change in Administration policy is a welcomed and necessary shift. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush secretly approved the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), which allowed law enforcement officials to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and terrorist associates without court order or review. Instead, the President himself reviewed the cases every forty-five days. Although this act was created with the best of intentions (as many controversial programs after large national tragedies seem to be), it was flawed in a number of respects.

First of all, it increased the power of law enforcement and thusly the Executive Branch when it did not need to be increased. The ability to eavesdrop on suspected terrorist communications in our country quickly has been available since at least 1970, when the FISA Court was established. There is no recorded (or at least public) instance where the FBI or any other federal agency lost valuable information or an actual attack happened as the result of the FISA Court either not being quick enough or denying a request for a warrant. The difference between the FISA Court and the TSP is that the former offers oversight as well as checks and balances while the latter does not.

This leads in to a second and perhaps the most important flaw of the TSP: the opportunity for abuses of power and infringement on civil liberties is too great to let stand. While it may not be the intention of the Bush Administration and Federal Agencies to walk over our civil liberties, good intentions are not sound enough assurance of their protection. We should not expect to give up certain rights either temporarily or in permanence in order to be safe. Fortunately, safety can be attained as we simultaneously enjoy the rights that we have been doing so up to September 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, however, the Bush Administration does not seem to believe this. They have persisted in creating programs and practices which have run ruff shod over numerous civil liberties. Their main avenue for such abuses has been the Patriot Act, specifically section 215. This section allows investigators to peer in to the reading and internet habits of suspected terrorists in public libraries. While this may not seem to be as large an offense as warrantless wiretapping, it is none the less warrantless and much more so an invasion of privacy.

Supporters of the program will often say that they do not care if the government sees what they have been reading or looking at on the internet, but I will offer a “what if situation” in response. What if the FBI suspected terrorists were planning an underwater attack on a port or harbor on the West Coast, and so decided to obtain the names and addresses of anyone who had taken out books on diving from public libraries in California? Perhaps this does not sound too egregious, but what if the Government then went one step further and sought the names and addresses of everyone in a particular area who had taken diving lessons or bought scuba gear from local scuba shops? Now the government is not only looking at the records of public institutions but those of private enterprises. Unfortunately this situation is not far fetched, as a very similar one is occurring in California at the moment.

But these particular civil liberty abuses are not the worst of all in comparison to what Vice President Dick Cheney discussed on Fox News Sunday. Cheney attempted to defend the idea that the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people’s rights as they examine the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and other suspects. He said, “The Defense Department gets involved because we’ve got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets.” If worrying about the NSA, FBI and other traditional law enforcement groups spying on us was not enough, we can now add to the list the Defense Department (which traditionally fights Nazis and other foreign armies) and the CIA (which traditionally spies on and disrupts our enemies’ activities overseas).

As it becomes more apparent every week that our government is actively and unapologetically spying on an untold number of loyal and patriotic Americans, it becomes difficult not to feel a great sense of unease about living our daily lives- not in fear of Al Qaeda killing us, but our own government keeping tabs on us. We must accept an unwanted fact if we are to recover our civil liberties unabridged: terrorism will never, ever be exterminated. Bush is wrong when he says the war on terrorism will be a long war- it will be a war that outlasts anyone who is reading this editorial. Terrorism will never disappear because there will always be people who hate America enough to hurt her and her people. If terrorism will never be completely defeated, are we to live under the ominous shroud of our government forever? We should keep in mind Ben Franklin’s saying, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”