Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Federal Agents poking around our libraries?
This article by Vanessa Blum notes that much of the conventional wisdom concerning the Patriot Act is wrong: "Critics frequently attribute policies to the act that are not technically included."
The Patriot Act passed Congress by overwhelming margins six weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Section 215, perhaps the law's most ballyhooed provision, authorizes the Federal Bureau of Investigation to demand court orders for tangible records related to national security cases held by third parties -- which could include places such as libraries or hospitals. Another controversial part of the law permits federal law enforcement to wait before notifying the target of a search warrant in certain circumstances.The misconceptions are as much as admitted by an anti-Patriot Act group:
The word "library" never actually appears in the act. Yet, mention the law in many parts of the country, and folks think it gives the FBI free rein to snoop on the books they read.
The association -- while overly simplistic -- has enormous resonance with the American public and has been seized upon by the law's opponents to tap into Americans' natural distrust of government.
"We don't like federal agents poking around our libraries," Democratic wunderkind Barack Obama, a Senate candidate from Illinois, said last week in his keynote speech at the party's national convention.
One ACLU handout alerts citizens that, under the Patriot Act, the government can "collect information about what books you read," "search your home and not even tell you," and "take away your property without a hearing."
"The ACLU would like to depict that we've returned to the Age of McCarthy," says Stuart Gerson, a partner at D.C.'s Epstein, Becker & Green and a senior DOJ official in the first Bush administration.
Dinh accuses critics of deliberately peddling misinformation. "A lot of the fears out there are based on misconceptions," he says.
"People are commenting on a lot of policies they find unfair. If they use the wrong name, I don't think they should be blamed," says Nancy Talanian, director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a Massachusetts-based grassroots organization that pushes anti-Patriot Act resolutions at the local level.To be clear, I generally take a civil-libertarian point-of-view, and I am against overly invasive or agressive law enforcement. But I think most of the provisions of the Patriot Act aren't excessive, and they're helping protect America.
Yes, we might disagree about the details, so let's have a rational discussion about them. And that starts with the facts.
