The war on terror, we are told, is fought here in America as much as it is abroad. Unfortunately, the weapons used on the home front are far too dangerous to be used safely or responsibly.
Signed into law by President Bush on the weekend of Saddam Hussein’s capture and promptly relegated to the backwaters of media analysis, the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2004 gives the FBI increased surveillance powers and broadens the scope of the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act.
The original Patriot Act, drafted under the careful guidance of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and passed by a frightened Congress (whose members were castigated by Ashcroft for worrying about “phantoms of lost liberties”) shortly after the World Trade Center attack, was a major erosion of Americans’ constitutional liberties and legal rights.
It provided for the indefinite detention of non-U.S. citizens; the denial of detainees to the right of counsel; the ability for law-enforcement agencies to make secret arrests, to wiretap individuals instead of specific phone numbers and to obtain warrants and search residences without immediately informing the occupants.
But the passage and signing into law of the Intelligence Authorization Act shows that we may have a second Patriot Act on our doorstep. The new law contains portions of the highly controversial “PATRIOT II” legislation, a draft of which was widely criticized after being leaked in 2003.
The Intelligence Authorization Act contains many clauses and provisions that are highly secret, including the exact cost of the authorized programs, “estimated to be about $40 billion,” according to an AP Newswire story. One of the non-secret provisions, however, was an unprecedented expansion of the FBI’s powers to monitor financial transactions and to procure records from financial institutions without seeking a judge’s approval.
Under the original Patriot Act, the FBI could demand records from financial institutions without probable cause, and the institution in question would be placed under a gag order forbidding it to notify customers if their records were accessed. The agency first had to seek out a subpoena from a federal judge or a senior government official’s approval.
But now, such records will be available to the FBI through a routine administrative procedure in which an agent is simply required to complete a form letter, thus making the records in question the province of anti-terror investigation. Furthermore, the definition of “financial institution” is expanded to include any business “whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or regulatory matters.”
Thus, even your dealings with car dealerships, stockbrokers, your insurance agent or a travel agency fall under the purview of secret FBI surveillance. And if your records were handed over to the FBI, you wouldn’t even be informed.
Once again, the White House scared Congress into passing a law significantly curtailing Americans’ liberties and privacy. Representatives and senators were unable to vote against the PATRIOT II provisions, since they were buried in the Intelligence Authorization Act. The act contained Bush’s requests for funding and programs in anti-terror intelligence, and Congress has lately shown a disturbing compliance in fulfilling Bush’s “requests,” such as the colossal price tag for unilateral military action in the Middle East.
“It appears we are witnessing a stealth enactment of the enormously unpopular PATRIOT II legislation …” protested Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, in the House of Representatives. “These expanded police powers will enable the FBI to demand transaction records from businesses … without the approval or knowledge of a judge or grand jury. This was written into the bill at the 11th hour over the objections of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would normally have jurisdiction over the FBI.”
Since September 2001, Bush and Ashcroft have sought to diminish the rights of U.S. citizens whenever it suited their purposes. They have faced setbacks, most recently in the arena of the federal court system, where the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has stated that Bush lacks the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens simply by declaring them “enemy combatants.” The appeals of U.S. citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi and José Padilla (who have been detained as “enemy combatants”) will now be heard in the Second Circuit over the Bush administration’s protests. But overall, the current assault on American rights and liberties continues unabated.
In 2001, Bush told the nation that terrorists “hate our freedoms” and that they seek to “disrupt and end a way of life.” Bush was speaking about terrorists at the time, but to many concerned Americans, it might now seem that Ashcroft, the Justice Department, and the current administration are doing more than enough by themselves to attack freedom and disrupt American liberty.
Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and philosophy.
