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I'm a fairly liberal guy but I've never understood all the whinnig about the patriot act. I've never heard of anyone having any negative personal experiences as a direct result of the patriot act. Has anybody? If you're doing nothing wrong it appears that you'll be just fine which is true for about 99% of the population. It's been in effect for several years and I hear so many complain about it but nobody that's actually been effected by it. It sort of goes hand and hand with airport body scanners and/or pat downs. THe extra 1-2 minutes it takes me to take my shoes and belt off has never caused me any trauma but I hear so many whine incessantly about it. Well, that's until something goes BOOM..Anyway, just my thoughts, flame away at your leisure.
I'm a fairly liberal guy but I've never understood all the whinnig about the patriot act. I've never heard of anyone having any negative personal experiences as a direct result of the patriot act. Has anybody? If you're doing nothing wrong it appears that you'll be just fine which is true for about 99% of the population. It's been in effect for several years and I hear so many complain about it but nobody that's actually been effected by it. It sort of goes hand and hand with airport body scanners and/or pat downs. THe extra 1-2 minutes it takes me to take my shoes and belt off has never caused me any trauma but I hear so many whine incessantly about it. Well, that's until something goes BOOM..Anyway, just my thoughts, flame away at your leisure.
Yeah who needs freedoms anyway? Just so long as they only do it to brown people with middle eastern names why whine about it?
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 there to 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.)[11][195][196] 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[197] 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".[198] 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.[199] 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. ******** 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.[200]
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",[201] 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".[202] 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[203] 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.[204]
The Act also allows access to voicemail through a search warrant rather than through a title III wiretap order.[205] James Dempsey, of the CDT, believes that it unnecessarily overlooks the importance of notice under the Fourth Amendment and under a Title III wiretap,[206] 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 couldn't use the messages in evidence against the defendant.[207] 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.[208]
The USA PATRIOT Act's expansion of court jurisdiction to allow the nationwide service of search warrants proved controversial for the EFF.[209] They believe that agencies will be able to "'shop' for judges that have demonstrated a strong bias toward law enforcement with regard to search warrants, using only those judges least likely to say no—even if the warrant doesn't satisfy the strict requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution",[210] and that it reduces the likelihood that smaller ISPs or phone companies will try to protect the privacy of their clients by challenging the warrant in court — their reasoning is that "a small San Francisco ISP served with such a warrant is unlikely to have the resources to appear before the New York court that issued it."[210] They believe that this is bad because only the communications provider will be able to challenge the warrant as only they will know about it—many warrants are issued ex parte, which means that the target of the order is not present when the order is issued.[210] For a time, the USA PATRIOT Act allowed for agents to undertake "sneak and peek" searches.[39] Critics such as EPIC and the ACLU strongly criticized the law for violating the Fourth Amendment,[211] with the ACLU going so far as to release an advertisement condemning it and calling for it to be repealed.[212][213] However supporters of the amendment, such as Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to the New York City Journal, expressed the belief that it was necessary because the temporary delay in notification of a search order stops terrorists from tipping off counterparts who are being investigated.[214] In 2004, FBI agents used this provision to search and secretly examine the home of Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongfully jailed for two weeks on suspicion of involvement in the Madrid train bombings. While the U.S. Government did publicly apologize to Mayfield and his family,[215] Mayfield took it further through the courts. On September 26, 2007, judge Ann Aiken found the law was, in fact, unconstitutional as the search was an unreasonable imposition on Mayfield and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.[40][41]
All that "controversy" and not one complaint from a citizen of it being misused or infringing on one persons rights. That's excatly my point. A whole lot of hype but no substance.
All that "controversy" and not one complaint from a citizen of it being misused or infringing on one persons rights. That's excatly my point. A whole lot of hype but no substance.
Of course there have been. You just have to do a simple Google search and pull up a few old news stories. Here is one where a portion of it was ruled unconstitutional after someone was affected by it.
Whenever they want. All it takes is the right environment to write up stricter legislation, claim precedent based on something like the PATRIOT Act, and voila. Today it's warrantless wiretapping, tomorrow it might be warrantless house searches. Why would that be a problem though? I mean, if you've got nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind them sniffing around your stuff for a bit right?
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