Resources on the USA Patriot Act

Friday, September 19th, 2003 | Politics

So over lunch I was reading more articles on the USA PATRIOT Act and realized I didn’t really understand what it was all about except from the dogma thats been thrown around. ACLU says its BAD BAD BAD and the administration says its this wonderful thing that protects us from the bad guys. I’m definitely more inclined to believe the ACLU than I am to believe John Ashcroft but it occurred to me that, rather than blindly believe anyone, it might be worth gathering info on my own. I found some really good information so I figured I’d share. Yes – some of the sources are more left leaning than others but what I liked is they had a LOT of really good references to other information so you can draw your own conclusions.

Read on if you care / dare


What I found most frustrating was that the Patriot act itself is really a series of amendments and adjustments to existing laws (with terms like insert a ‘;’ here and remove a paragraph there) so you can’t really just curl up with it and read it straight through – instead you have to have other bills like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act at hand too. So its very helpful to have other information available and an overview page as a roadmap is useful – just make sure when you read the overview pages that you keep in mind the angle the author is coming from. I know this may all be obvious but it seemed worth throwing out there lest you think I was treating the overviews from folks like the ACLU and EPIC as gospel cuz they’re not – they’re just as biased as the DOJ pages.

So here are the resources I’ve found. Take them for what they’re worth or leave them – just thought I’d share… At the bottom is my impression but thats just my interpretation so take it in the same vein as all the rest.

Information on the USA Patriot Act itself:

Related (and ammdended) Legislation:


Related News:

General Resources


My take? My overall impression of the act based on some reading is that it is deeply flawed. It seems to have been ram-rodded through congress with no time for discussion and debate and was passed out of hand with only one no vote and one abstention in a time when the country was deeply hurting and passed by opportunistic lawmakers who took advantage of a nation’s moment of weakness. Assuming the intentions are pure and with an eye toward thwarting terrorism (which I’m not sold on but thats another) there are still important failures which make it less than effective at fighting the terrorists they’re looking for. In addition, there are very intentional ambiguities in the law that you can drive a truck through which give law enforcement unprecedented access to personal information on american citizens completely unrelated to terrorism in the name of national security.

Another thing i’m starting to discover, however, is that I’m less than thrilled with the voting patterns of the Senate and I have to question the thought patterns involved making decisions. I was very upset to see that this particular bill was passed by an overwhelming majority including both of my representatives (Feinstein and Boxer) and was about to write it off to a reactionary result of 9/11 (which it probably was). However in a completely random and unscientific sampling of other voting patterns by the senate an interesting pattern seems to emerge. The general votes seem to fall into two camps – either an overwhelming majority (i.e. 95 or greater percent of the vote) either for or against a given issue or a squeaker vote that falls almost directly along party lines.. So to say that on this one issue was a landslide due to 9/11 probably isn’t quite as accurate as saying that this was a landslide because public sentiment was emphatically in support.

On the one hand, this makes sense and shouldn’t surprise me since they’re supposed to be our representatives and voting on our behalf. But on the other hand, I also expect them to do homework and research to understand the ramifications of what crosses their desk before making judgments rather than letting polling and party lines make decisions for them. I guess I would have liked to have seen some debate on an issue like this and see a few people have the balls to stand up and say “I hear all of you when you say that we need laws to help defend against terrorism but this bill as written isn’t the solution and here are the reasons why….. and here are is my proposal for what we can do without sacrificing our values…”. The only example of this I could find was from Russell Feingold. I guess maybe I’m just expecting too much..

Anyway..Dig around on the sites above and draw your own conclusions! These are just some of my reactions

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