Unless we stop Bills C-35 & 36 right now,
       we may end up like our neighbours down south,
       in the Land of the [CENSORED] and the Home of the
       [SUPPRESSED] --

       Mark Dillon
       Quebec, Canada


http://www.commondreams.org/

Published on Friday, November 9, 2001

       The New USA PATRIOT Act
       Are You a Patriot?

       by John Kaminski


The USA Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has
eliminated the Constitutional guarantee of probable cause when
investigating a crime, and now allows the police -- at any time and for
any reason -- to enter and search your house, your files, your bank
account -- and not even tell you about it.

Are you a patriot? Well, the fact of the matter is, you are whether
you want to be or not. But are you an American or a mindless corporate
stooge? Well, that's another question.

The recent passage and signing of the Patriot Act has effectively
nullified at least six amendments of the Bill of Rights addendum to
the U.S. Constitution. As a result of this, America is longer America,
but a police state, pure and simple. This Patriot Bill is, in fact, a
massive violation of the Constitution it purports to uphold and
improve.

Among other things, it mandates that judges give police search
warrants when they ask for them, for any reason. In fact, judges can't
deny these warrants to police, because police don't need a stated
reason to ask for them.

The Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of American freedom. During the
debates on the adoption of the Constitution in the 1790s, its
opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would
open the way to tyranny by the central government. Many states would
not have signed the original Constitution without knowing that these
amendments would be added, according to the federal website which
displays the Constitution. These amendments became known as the Bill
of Rights, which Americans have cherished, protected and fought for
for over 200 years.

The Patriot Act rushed through Congress and signed by President George
W. Bush is a major step toward a totalitarian state in which
individual liberty is crushed by the whim of police and corporate
demagogues masquerading as patriots.

The Patriot Act:

  * Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, right to
 peaceably assemble provision, and petition the government for
 redress of grievances provision; it violates the First Amendment
 to the Constitution three times. More on this below.

  * Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in
 astonishingly major and repeated ways. The Fourth Amendment to the
 Constitution reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their
 persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
 searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants
 shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
 affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched,
 and the persons of things to be seized." The Patriot Act, now
 passed and the law of the land, has revoked the necessity for
 probable cause, and now allows the police, at any time and for any
 reason, to enter and search your house -- and not even tell you
 about it.

  * Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite
 incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney
 General to be threats to national security. The Fifth Amendment
 guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or
 property without due process of law, and the Patriot Act does away
 with due process. It even allows people to be kept in prison for
 life without even a trial.

  * Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy
 and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.

  * Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).

  * Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction).

Most of the following information is taken from the ACLU's written
objections to Congress before and after the passage of the Patriot
Act. My comments are in brackets [].

The Patriot Act does the following (I'm putting the immigration stuff
at the bottom because that least affects most of the people who will
be reading this):

  * [It keeps judges out the process and lets cops do what they want
 (cops meaning FBI, CIA, etc.)] It minimizes judicial supervision
 of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement
 authorities in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine
 criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to
 terrorism -- that means anything. How long do you think before that
 includes political dissent? Oops, too late, that's already
 happened.]

  * It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret
 searches -- again in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine
 criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to
 terrorism -- that means anything they want it to mean. If we don't
 agree with Nazi Republican ideas, they can now arrest us.]

  * It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power
 to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block
 any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country.
 Under this provision the payment of membership dues is a
 deportable offense. [That means, among other things, that Bush and
 Ashcroft can decide Greenpeace and Ralph Nader are terrorists, and
 under this law, it can put them in jail.]

  * It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial,
 mental health, and educational records about individuals without
 having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order. [It
 means they can do what they want for no good reason, except to
 persecute and imprison people with humanistic, noncorporate
 rip-off views.]

  * It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens
 for "intelligence" purposes and use of intelligence authorities to
 by-pass probable cause requirements in criminal cases. [Bye bye
 peace movement. You're all going to jail; me too.]

  * It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the
 business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central
 Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for
 intelligence surveillance in the United States. [This is what
 America worked so hard for all those years to eliminate.]

  * It allows searches of highly personal financial records without
 notice and without judicial review based on a very low standard
 that does not require probable cause of a crime or even relevancy
 to an ongoing terrorism investigation. [They can do any of this
 stuff without any reason whatsoever. This is the kind of freedom
 these fascists always wanted -- freedom to put everyone who
 disagrees with them in jail.]

  * It creates a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that
 could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and
 subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties. [This means
 they can jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in
 jail for life without a trial.]

On immigration specifically, the new law permits the detention of
non-citizens facing deportation based merely on the Attorney General's
certification that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" the
non-citizen endangers national security. While immigration or criminal
charges must be filed within seven days, these charges need not have
anything to do with terrorism, but can be minor visa violations of the
kind that normally would not result in detention at all. Non-citizens
ordered removed on visa violations could be indefinitely detained if
they are stateless, their country of origin refuses to accept them, or
they are granted relief from deportation because they would be
tortured if they were returned to their country of origin.

It permits the Attorney General to indefinitely incarcerate or detain
non-citizens based on mere suspicion, and to deny readmission to the
United States of non-citizens (including lawful permanent residents)
for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. [Or, what
used to be the First Amendment. Now, it doesn't exist.]

Let me just take a bit more of your valuable time to make a couple of
points crystal clear, again using material from the ACLU's objections
to passage of the Patriot Act.

       Wiretapping and Intelligence Surveillance

The wiretapping and intelligence provisions in the USA Patriot Act
sound two themes: they minimize the role of a judge in ensuring that
law enforcement wiretapping is conducted legally and with proper
justification, and they permit use of intelligence investigative
authority to by-pass normal criminal procedures that protect privacy.
Specifically:

1. The USA Patriot Act allows the government to use its intelligence
gathering power to circumvent the standard that must be met for
criminal wiretaps. Currently FISA surveillance, which does not contain
many of the same checks and balances that govern wiretaps for criminal
purposes, can be used only when foreign intelligence gathering is the
primary purpose. The new law allows use of FISA surveillance authority
even if the primary purpose were a criminal investigation.
Intelligence surveillance merely needs to be only a "significant"
purpose. This provision authorizes unconstitutional physical searches
and wiretaps: though it is searching primarily for evidence of crime,
law enforcement conducts a search without probable cause of crime.

2. The USA Patriot Act extends a very low threshold of proof for
access to Internet communications that are far more revealing than
numbers dialed on a phone. Under current law, a law enforcement agent
can get a pen register or trap and trace order requiring the telephone
company to reveal the numbers dialed to and from a particular phone.
To get such an order, law enforcement must simply certify to a judge --
who must grant the order -- that the information to be obtained is
"relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." This is a very low
level of proof, far less than probable cause. This provision
apparently applies to law enforcement efforts to determine what
websites a person had visited, which is like giving law enforcement
the power -- based only on its own certification -- to require the
librarian to report on the books you had perused while visiting the
public library. This provision extends a low standard of proof -- far
less than probable cause -- to actual "content" information.

3. In allowing for "nationwide service" of pen register and trap and
trace orders, the law further marginalizes the role of the judiciary.
It authorizes what would be the equivalent of a blank warrant in the
physical world: the court issues the order, and the law enforcement
agent fills in the places to be searched. This is not consistent with
the important Fourth Amendment privacy protection of requiring that
warrants specify the place to be searched. Under this legislation, a
judge is unable to meaningfully monitor the extent to which her order
was being used to access information about Internet communications.

4. The Act also grants the FBI broad access in "intelligence"
investigations to records about a person maintained by a business. The
FBI need only certify to a court that it is conducting an intelligence
investigation and that the records it seeks may be relevant. With this
new power, the FBI can force a business to turn over a person's
educational, medical, financial, mental health and travel records
based on a very low standard of proof and without meaningful judicial
oversight.

The ACLU noted that the FBI already had broad authority to monitor
telephone and Internet communications. Most of the changes apply not
just to surveillance of terrorists, but instead to all surveillance in
the United States. [All surveillance. The WTO geeks will love this
one. Now we can be just like China.]

Law enforcement authorities -- even when they are required to obtain
court orders -- have great leeway under current law to investigate
suspects in terrorist attacks. Current law already provided, for
example, that wiretaps can be obtained for the crimes involved in
terrorist attacks, including destruction of aircraft and aircraft
piracy.

The FBI also already had authority to intercept these communications
without showing probable cause of crime for "intelligence" purposes
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, FISA
wiretaps now exceed wiretapping for all domestic criminal
investigations. The standards for obtaining a FISA wiretap are lower
than the standards for obtaining a criminal wiretap.

       Criminal Justice

The law dramatically expands the use of secret searches. Normally, a
person is notified when law enforcement conducts a search. In some
cases regarding searches for electronic information, law enforcement
authorities can get court permission to delay notification of a
search. The USA Patriot Act extends the authority of the government to
request "secret searches" to every criminal case. This vast expansion
of power goes far beyond anything necessary to conduct terrorism
investigations.

The Act also allows for the broad sharing of sensitive information in
criminal cases with intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the NSA,
the INS and the Secret Service. It permits sharing of sensitive grand
jury and wiretap information without judicial review or any safeguards
regarding the future use or dissemination of such information.

These information sharing authorizations and mandates effectively put
the CIA back in the business of spying on Americans: Once the CIA
makes clear the kind of information it seeks, law enforcement agencies
can use tools like wiretaps and intelligence searches to provide data
to the CIA. In fact, the law specifically gives the Director of
Central Intelligence -- who heads the CIA -- the power to identify
domestic intelligence requirements.

The law also creates a new crime of "domestic terrorism." The new
offense threatens to transform protesters into terrorists if they
engage in conduct that "involves acts dangerous to human life."
Members of Operation Rescue, the Environmental Liberation Front and
Greenpeace, for example, have all engaged in activities that could
subject them to prosecution as terrorists. Then, under this law, the
dominos begin to fall. Those who provide lodging or other assistance
to these "domestic terrorists" could have their homes wiretapped and
could be prosecuted.

[If you have any doubt that these are the trappings of a police state,
then you need to go back to elementary school and read about the
Constitution, which we no longer have.]

[Fox News Channel reports tonight that 90% of the American people are
really happy with what Bush has done. I think somebody wrote this all
in a book once, that when a free people gave away their freedom, they
did it happily and with much fanfare.]


John Kaminski live in Englewood Florida.
E-mail: skylax@home.com


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