Headphones Not Required

mohandasgandhi:

The USA Patriot Act became law ten years ago today. Bearing the awkward name, Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, it passed the US Senate by an overwhelming vote of 96-1, with only Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) in dissent, voicing deep concerns about the impact the new law would have on civil liberties and privacy rights.

During the debate over the Patriot Act, Senator Feingold observed that the “founders who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights exercised that vigilance even though they had recently fought and won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers and an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace.”

He traced the dark periods in our nation’s history when civil liberties took a back seat to what appeared at the time to be the legitimate exigencies of war, including the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II, the blacklisting of alleged communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the Vietnam War.

Feingold pointedly quoted Justice Arthur Goldberg in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez (1963):

It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation’s foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action. ‘The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances…. In no other way can we transmit to posterity unimpaired the blessings of liberty, consecrated by the sacrifices of the Revolution.

Feingold observed that even within the single month since 9/11, there was “ample reason for concern” over “the potential loss of commitment to traditional civil liberties.”

“Even as America addresses the demanding security challenges before us, we must strive mightily also to guard our values and basic rights,” he said. “We must guard against racism and ethnic discrimination against people of Arab and South Asian origin and those who are Muslim.”

Feingold quoted the great jurist Judge Learned Hand, who said during World War II: “[T]he spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias….”

With tragic prescience, Feingold noted that, “There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country that allowed the police to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your email communications; if we lived in a country that allowed the government to hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt discover and arrest more terrorists.”

“But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. That would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America.”

Feingold complained about how the Bush administration was “relentlessly” pushing the Patriot Act “without deliberation and debate.” As chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, Feingold expressed deep concern that the legislation, “did not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting constitutional freedoms.”

Under one provision, Feingold warned that, “the government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone,” which he called “a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.”

He called the debate on a bill that “may have the most far-reaching consequences on the civil liberties of the American people in a generation,” a non-debate and not the finest hour for the United States Senate.

Seeing so clearly into the future, Feingold warned that it was immigrants from Arab, Muslim and South Asian countries who would bear the brunt of the Patriot Act. “In the wake of these terrible events, our government has been given vast new powers, and they may fall most heavily on a minority of our population who already feel particularly acutely the pain of this disaster.” And in turn, Feingold reminded us that Justice Louis Brandeis foresaw the future in a 1928 dissent, when he wrote:

The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home…. Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?

Feingold responded by insisting that we, “must maintain our vigilance to preserve our laws and our basic rights. You and I have a duty to analyze, to test, to weigh new laws that the zealous and often sincere advocates of security would suggest to us.” Acknowledging that, “protecting the safety of the American people is a solemn duty of the Congress,” Feingold urged that, “Congress will fulfill its duty only when it protects both the American people and the freedoms at the foundation of American society. So let us preserve our heritage of basic rights. Let us practice that liberty. And let us fight to maintain that freedom that we call America.”

(Continue reading…)

Read this. Don’t forget about the Patriot Act. This is how Wall Street is allowed to spy on NY citizens with tax payer money.