Jeffrey Rosen wonders which Democratic Senator and/or Congress-critter is going to have the stones to gut the Patriot Act. I only hope one of them does, but I'm skeptical to say the least. Even Dick Durbin sounds like he isn't planning to make any noise about re-instituting the Bill of Rights or other civil liberties trampled by the Patriot Act. Meh. A pox on both their houses if not.
Jeffrey Rosen - The Way We Live Now: Who’s Watching the F.B.I.?
The information it gathers may too often be your own.In “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” Woody Allen shows up at Mia Farrow’s window on a flying bicycle and urges her to hop on. “Andrew, we’ll get killed,” she protests. “Trust me,” he replies, “it’s me, Andrew.” She looks skeptical, and he tries again. “Trust me anyhow.”
In the latest and most serious post-9/11 civil-liberties abuse to emerge from Washington, the Bush administration’s “Trust me anyhow” defense has finally collapsed. The scandal involves “national-security letters,” which the F.B.I. has secretly used to scrutinize the financial data, travel records and telephone logs of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents. In March, a report by the inspector general of the Justice Department described “widespread and serious misuse” of national-security letters after the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001 significantly expanded the F.B.I.’s authority to issue them: between 2003 and 2005, he concluded, the F.B.I. issued more than 140,000 national-security letters, many involving people with no obvious connections to terrorism. The Bush administration was fortunate that, shortly after the F.B.I. scandal broke, the tempest over the Justice Department’s firing of prosecutors bumped it off the front page.
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Fortunately, some in the new Congress have indicated that they intend to revisit the Patriot Act. The broad outlines of the necessary reforms have long been obvious. Congress needs to restore independent review by judges in cases where the Patriot Act eliminated it, ensuring neutral oversight of secret searches. Those searches should be focused on the associates of suspected terrorists, rather than sweeping up any citizen who has information that might possibly be relevant. And Congress should restore a degree of transparency by lifting the gag orders in secret searches after a reasonable period of time.At a hearing before the House Select Intelligence Committee last month, Justice Department and F.B.I. witnesses, sticking doggedly to their script, said that putting courts in the middle of the process would slow it down. This time, however, the “Trust me anyhow” defense had few takers. “I think self-policing has failed horribly,” said Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat. If Congress continues to focus on the F.B.I. abuses, many Americans may come around to the same view. Unlike the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists abroad, which supposedly involved them, the F.B.I.’s domestic surveillance clearly involves us.
Tags: civil_liberties, /civil_rights, /FBI, /Patriot_Act, /surveillance
