Patriot Act Hysterics

Fire of Liberty
The great Mark Levin, WABC radio host, author of Men in Black and lawyer extraordinaire, has a great post over at National Review Online's blog the Corner that provides a little insight into the why cover story about the NSA monitoring communications in which American contacted others outside of the US via E-Mail or Telephone. While the writers of these article in the NY Times and the Washington Post and most of the MSM are making these acts on the NSA's behalf as a major scandal, it seems that the White House and the NSA are actually going by the book. Take a look at what Levin said in his post:

Some brief background: The Foreign Intelligence Security Act permits the government to monitor foreign communications, even if they are with U.S. citizens -- 50 USC 1801, et seq. A FISA warrant is only needed if the subject communications are wholly contained in the United States and involve a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.

The reason the President probably had to sign an executive order is that the Justice Department office that processes FISA requests, the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), can take over 6 months to get a standard FISA request approved. It can become extremely bureaucratic, depending on who is handling the request. His executive order is not contrary to FISA if he believed, as he clearly did, that he needed to act quickly. The president has constitutional powers, too.

It's real interesting that this little tid-bit of info was splashed in two major papers on the same day that the US Senate had a debate and vote on extending the Patriot Act. If anyone watched any of the back and forth on the Senate floor today, then you are well aware that a lot of Senators like Leahy, Kennedy, Feingold and a lot of other folks we're waving this front page around as a reason to reject extending the Patriot Act. The only problem is that the Foreign Intelligence Security Act has been in effect since 1978 thus outdating the Patriot Act.

And speaking about the Patriot Act, why are folks in the Senate so worried about roving wiretaps and allowing the feds to keep track of people's library activities. Let's start with the fact that in order for the feds to conduct either one of these actions, they've got to demonstrate to the FISA court that the folks they've looking at is have demonstrated something or done something to earn such speculation in the first place. When you hear about the Patriot Act allowing the feds to investigate one's library activity, the folks complaining fail to mention that the FBI isn't looking at what folks are reading but is merely wanting to inquire more about their activities on library computers because some of the known September 11th hijackers and terrorist in general are products of the information age and use free E-Mail accounts like Yahoo, MSN, and G-Mail to get their orders. If they've been trailing a person who they suspect to be a terrorists or known to associate with terrorists walk into a library, then simple logic tells me that they should a least be able to find out what the person they're trailing has been doing in the library. (I can assure you their not checking out art books, Che books or reading the latest issue of the New Yorker.) So while we don't know the number of suspected terrorists caught by this technique it seems to be just alarmist hyperbole to rev up the anti-Patriot Act crowd, but seems to washed away Senator Feinstein, who has a lifetime rating of 73% with the ACLU and has some differences with the Patriot Act(Ted Kennedy has a 77% rating), couldn't cite one instance where the Patriot Act was actually abused. Read what Sen Feistein noted in a July 29, 2005 press release on the passage of an extending of the Patriot Act:

As part of my effort to oversee the implementation of the USA-Patriot Act, I asked the ACLU, in a letter dated March 25, 2005, to provide an update of their October 2003 statement that they did not know of any abuses of the USA-Patriot Act.

On April 4, 2005 , the ACLU published a reply to my letter, in which they listed what they described as ‘abuses and misuses’ of the Act. I carefully reviewed each of the examples provided in the letter. I also reviewed information provided to me by the Department of Justice about each of the examples. And while I understand the concerns raised by the ACLU, it does not appear that these charges rose to the level of ‘abuse’ of the Patriot Act.

This conclusion has been borne out by numerous inquiries, hearings and briefings. Simply put, there have been no sustainable allegations of serious abuse of the Act.

That said, I believe that we can, and should, make some changes to the Patriot Act to ensure it is less likely to be abused in the future.

Furthermore, I am confident that the expiring USA-Patriot Act provisions should be retained. The sixteen sunsetted provisions are generally working well, and should be reauthorized with some of the modifications reflected in the bill we take up today.

The bottom line is that the Judiciary Committee was able to do its work, and reach appropriate compromises. This allowed the Committee to favorably report this bill by a vote of 18-0. This type of consensus and bipartisanship is welcome, and bodes well for our continued work on these critical issues.

This nation faces difficult times. We know that there are those already in our country or trying to enter our country who would do us grievous injury and harm unless we can stop them – and to stop them, we must find them first – before they act – not after they act. Therefore, this bill is necessary and prudent.

All in all, if you're not doing anything illegal or doing something connected to terrorism, you aren't going to have the FBI requesting your records from your local library. After what we went through on 9-11, I'd prefer that we err on the side of caution and allow the FBI to continue its work, which from the looks of it has worked pretty good at preventing terrorism the past four years. As for the roving wire taps, the opponents are making a mountain out of ant-hill. I don't know about you but the terrorists we face today are pretty well educated about what the FBI could and could not do with tapping their phones. In the pre-Patriot Act days, the FBI could attain a wire tap on a specific land-line phone or cell-phone but once the terrorists disconnected service or with the case with the cell he would just throw it away and get another one somewhere else thus causing the FBI to scramble back to a judge to get another wire tap which gives the terrorists some breathing and keeps the FBI in the dark. The only thing this part of the Patriot Act did was to give the FBI the same abilities to tap the terrorists phones like they already do with the mobsters. I'd say that the guy wishing to blow up another World Trade Center or subway should merit the same if not more scrutiny as the real life Tony Soprano. So we can huff and puff about the Patriot Act allowing the government unfettered access to our lives but its really just an essential tool in tracking dow bin Laden and not bin Granny.

You'd think that the folks in the Senate would be more interested in keeping us safe from terrorists then fretting about folks breaking laws that are not being broken. Maybe the should use less rhetoric and more common sense in making laws that strengthens us in out fight against terrorism. I just wished the White House was more out front in fighting for the Patriot Act and not let the Senate tie our hands behind our backs at such an important moment.