Why Is the USA PATRIOT Act Unconstitutional and Controversial? Salman Rushdie (2004)

• published: 20 Apr 2015
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The USA PATRIOT Act has generated a great deal of controversy since its enactment. Opponents of the Act have been quite vocal in asserting that it was passed opportunistically after the September 11 attacks, believing that there would have been little debate. They view the Act as one that was hurried through the Senate with little change before it was passed. (Senators Patrick Leahy and Russell Feingold proposed amendments to modify the final revision.) The sheer magnitude of the Act itself was noted by Michael Moore in his controversial film Fahrenheit 9/11. In one of the scenes of the movie, he records Congressman Jim McDermott alleging that no Senator read the bill and John Conyers, Jr. as saying, "We don't read most of the bills. Do you really know what that would entail if we read every bill that we passed?" Congressman Conyers then answers his own rhetorical question, asserting that if they did it would "slow down the legislative process".[206] As a dramatic device, Moore then hired an ice-cream van and drove around Washington, D.C. with a loud speaker, reading out the Act to puzzled passers-by, which included a few Senators. However, Moore was not the only commentator to notice that not many people had read the Act. When Dahlia Lithwick and Julia Turne for Slate asked, "How bad is PATRIOT, anyway?", they decided that it was "hard to tell" and stated: The ACLU, in a new fact sheet challenging the DOJ Web site, wants you to believe that the act threatens our most basic civil liberties. Ashcroft and his roadies call the changes in law "modest and incremental." Since almost nobody has read the legislation, much of what we think we know about it comes third-hand and spun. Both advocates and opponents are guilty of fear-mongering and distortion in some instances. One prime example of a controversy of the Patriot Act is shown in the case of Susan Lindauer. Another is the recent court case United States v. Antoine Jones. A nightclub owner was linked to a drug trafficking stash house via a law enforcement GPS tracking device attached to his car. It was placed there without a warrant, which caused a serious conviction obstacle for federal prosecutors in court. Through the years the case rose all the way to the United States Supreme Court where the conviction was overturned in favor of the defendant. The court found that increased monitoring of suspects caused by such legislation like the Patriot Act directly put the suspects' Constitutional rights in jeopardy. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has criticized the law as unconstitutional, especially when "the private communications of law-abiding American citizens might be intercepted incidentally",[209] while the Electronic Frontier Foundation held that the lower standard applied to wiretaps "gives the FBI a 'blank check' to violate the communications privacy of countless innocent Americans".[48] Others do not find the roving wiretap legislation to be as concerning. Professor David D. Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center, a critic of many of the provisions of the Act, found that though they come at a cost to privacy are a sensible measure[210] while Paul Rosenzweig, a Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, argues that roving wiretaps are just a response to rapidly changing communication technology that is not necessarily fixed to a specific location or device.[211] The Act also allows access to voicemail through a search warrant rather than through a title III wiretap order.[212] James Dempsey, of the CDT, believes that it unnecessarily overlooks the importance of notice under the Fourth Amendment and under a Title III wiretap,[213] and the EFF criticizes the provision's lack of notice. However, the EFF's criticism is more extensive—they believe that the amendment "is in possible violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution" because previously if the FBI listened to voicemail illegally, it could not use the messages in evidence against the defendant.[214] Others disagree with these assessments. Professor Orin Kerr, of the George Washington University school of law, believes that the ECPA "adopted a rather strange rule to regulate voicemail stored with service providers" because "under ECPA, if the government knew that there was one copy of an unopened private message in a person's bedroom and another copy on their remotely stored voicemail, it was illegal for the FBI to simply obtain the voicemail; the law actually compelled the police to invade the home and rifle through peoples' bedrooms so as not to disturb the more private voicemail." In Professor Kerr's opinion, this made little sense and the amendment that was made by the USA PATRIOT Act was reasonable and sensible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act