Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/02/epic-fail-congress-usa-patriot-act-renewed-without

by CoryOndrejka • 16 years ago

135 62 16 years ago

eff.org

dougp• 16 years ago

Maybe next year

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

I'm shocked, shocked!

raganwald2• 16 years ago

Your winnings, sir.

mhartl• 16 years ago

N.B. The parent comment is a seemingly obscure movie reference,* but is surprisingly Google-able.

*The movie itself is not obscure at all.

croby• 16 years ago

yet to be signed, just passed by the house

jswinghammer3• 16 years ago

After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life is anyone surprised? The Congress care about increasing the power of the government and doing whatever it is they want to do when they're in power. They like the new powers when they are in power and criticize them when they are out of power. Though the Neocons just criticize how much they are used rather than their existence so I guess they're more consistent.

I wonder when the small government conservatives will leave the Republican party and when the anti-war, pro civil liberties liberals will leave the Democratic party?

I think Barack Obama did a masterful job of pacifying the anti-war left by annoying his intention to withdraw from Iraq after a certain period of time. I don't know that it will actually happen but it was a pretty smart move to get it off of people's minds for the most part.

We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition. I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this.

lucifer3• 16 years ago

> "I wonder how long it will be before more people realize this."

It is not in the interest of the ruling elite for this fact to become apparent. They control education and media, and have mastered the art of dividing society along various (ultimately facile and irrelevant) fault lines.

(Do you remember when Blue and Red state meme suddenly appeared out of nowhere like a cheap ready-made knockoff hanging in every one of our various media outlets? Is it a surprise that every time the country finally starts focusing on a substantial issue some completely random troll topic is pushed on queue; is the biggest problem facing USA the decision to allow gay marriage or to rescue this sinking ship of a state?)

"We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition."

You take that sentence and run it by a random sampling of 18 year olds in America. A certain proportion may be able to parse it; a subset of that may actually understand what is said; an even smaller subset would be able to reason about the proposition. Am I being completely pessimistic for thinking that the percentage that can even understand that as English is in single digit percentile?

lallysingh3• 16 years ago

Remember this? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...

How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it.

That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter.

And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).

cynicalkane3• 16 years ago

This is a pretty poor comparison. You'd do better to cite a Congressional action that turned out to be a bad idea, like the Iraq War. When you cite TARP you're actually saying "the public is dumb and doesn't understand economics," which is a pretty accurate assessment, but not the one you were trying to make.

TARP probably saved us from a Great Depression, and IIRC the bailouts are in the black except for the segments bailing out the government mortgage banks and the car companies. FTR, the protests against Volcker's anti-inflation measures in the 70s were bigger, with farmers eventually blockading the Fed headquarters with their tractors. The protestors were wrong then, too.

jrockway4• 16 years ago

Indeed. The banks paid TARP back very quickly. I imagined it was going to be something that would take place over 30 or 50 years, but it happened in a matter of weeks. Not a bad investment on the government's part -- they might have even made some money!

drunkpotato• 16 years ago

It's a bit too soon to be saying TARP was a good piece of legislation. It's also a bit of fantasy to say what would have happened if TARP hadn't passed.

The thing is, TARP hasn't led to any reforms in the financial sector. It simply shoveled taxpayer money at private corporations with very few strings attached, which propped up the banks long enough to say "hey, thanks, we would have been fine anyway, really, now piss off".

I think we'd be a lot better off without TARP. Your smug "the protestors were wrong" is unjustified.

anamax4• 16 years ago

> TARP probably saved us from a Great Depression,

Oh really? How did forcing "loans" on Wells Fargo and other banks that didn't need money save us from anything?

Note that as the money is repaid, it's being spent on pork under the "hey look, we didn't expect that" theory.

> the bailouts are in the black except for the segments bailing out the government mortgage banks

The payments to Goldman via AIG?

Note that Fannie and Freddie are continuing to lose money in a desperate attempt to delay additional housing market loses until after the election.

guelo3• 16 years ago

After TARP passed in the midst of one of the largest protests of a congressional action that I've witnessed in my life

I guess you weren't alive in 2003 for the Guiness world record largest protest in human history against the Iraq war, including 400,000 in New York, 200,000 in SF, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_prot...

EDIT: took out the London and Rome references

Eliezer• 16 years ago

> including 2 million people in London, 3 million in Rome

Is that outside the US? I don't recognize these cities.

jswinghammer3• 16 years ago

Those are large numbers but few people in those cities vote in U.S. elections :)

guelo3• 16 years ago

Of course the difference is that tea partiers are upstanding Real Americans while the Iraq war protesters were dirty fucking hippies so they don't count.

sailormoon• 16 years ago

We don't have a two party system but we have a bi-factional ruling coalition.

Great choice of words. I love how it applies equally well to the USA and China. I agree, of course, and think it applies to most modern democracies, in whom I have zero faith.

evgen2• 16 years ago

It's not really surprising if you consider the options that were available:

1) Renew the current law. No real upside for any legislator, but no significant downside.

2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument.

3) Amend the current law. An effort which would have needed to start a while ago. With enough bi-partisan support this could have limited the downside risk and enabled supporters to make the sort of "we are being smart about protecting ourselves form terrorists while protecting liberties" arguments that would have electoral upside, but given the current legislative climate it would have been a hard task to get the early defectors form the status quo which would have provided a bit of momentum.

gnosis3• 16 years ago

"2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument."

If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do.

If they want not to be attacked at all, they should just stay completely out of politics.

Of course, they should pick their battles, and fight the ones that are really important. It's obvious from their inaction on and even outright support of the PATRIOT Act, that civil liberties just aren't that important to them, no matter what their rhetoric might be.

The same has been true regarding their "opposition" to torture, to the Iraq war, to Bush's Supreme Court nominees, their support of the "public option" for health care, etc. The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama.

Their spinelessness and willingness to be the Bush-lite party could cost them dearly in the mid-terms and 2012. They're just lucky the Republican party is tearing itself apart with their "tea party" splintering and fighting over who are the "real conservatives".

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

It isn't just that it isn't important, many of them actively oppose it.

Joe Biden's opinion on the patriot act: "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up [the patriot act] was my bill..."

jcmhn• 16 years ago

> Their spinelessness and willingness to be the Bush-lite party could cost them dearly in the mid-terms and 2012.

The republicans could pick up some disaffected democrats as single issue voters on hot-button topics. But the social conservative agenda that the republicans are married to is fairly distasteful to people who regularly vote democrat - even if the parties are 95% identical in practice.

evgen2• 16 years ago

If you haven't noticed, the Republicans and their mainsteram media lapdogs are going to attack the Democrats as being "weak on national security" and "weak on terrorism" no matter what they do.

Of course they were going to get attacked on that point. What matters is if there is a public perception about a candidate or party that the attacks can use as leverage to rise above the level of standard electioneering and actually influence a voter.

The Democrats have shown very little spine on these matters, when it comes time to walk their talk. And the public is noticing. That's why Congress has such a low approval rating, and why the shine is wearing-off Obama.

You have obviously confused these people with some idealized version of the world that you imagine might have existed -- they were elected and get to do what they want to or are able to do, not what you want them to do. They are all doing pretty much what they campaigned on and what would be expected of them given the circumstances.

SamAtt• 16 years ago

There's an unfortunate reality here which is that the Government can't really prevent terrorist attacks. Israel is much smaller and they've tried much harder and they can't prevent them so the U.S. stands very little chance.

So another attack will happen some day. It's a given (and both the Bush and Obama administrations have said as much)

That's where the Patriot Act comes in. Every politician believes it would be the death of their career if they change or reject the existing law only to have that inevitable terrorist attack take place right after. And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right.

So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack. I won't be holding my breath.

cynicalkane3• 16 years ago

More accurately, the government can prevent terrorist attacks, but that will take sophisticated and unpopular foreign policy measures. The Patriot Act, security theater, war, and other such nonsense is easier to sell to voters and lobbies.

JshWright2• 16 years ago

I think the implication above is that you can't prevent _every_ terrorist attack. I think that's a pretty defensible argument to make.

Geography alone makes it pretty obvious that you can't stop a determined group from carrying out an attack. So that leaves making nice with those groups so that they don't want to attack us.

Given the fact that there are radical groups at either end of just about any political or religious spectrum you can think of, the idea of appeasing all of them is nuts. The very actions necessary to appease one group could incite another to attack.

This is, of course, putting aside the idea that the motivation behind some violence isn't motivated by our actions at all, but rather by internal politics within extremist groups. There are a lot of folks out there who are awfully fond of power, and one of the easiest ways to garner power is to rally people against a common enemy (who cares if that "enemy" actually instigated anything... that's easy enough to spin)

So, all that to say... We're never going to prevent every terrorist attack, we can only work to minimize the collateral damage. In my opinion, the Patriot Act is just about the biggest example of collateral damage we've seen resulting from terrorist attacks, and I'm saddened to see that Congress chose to do nothing to limit that.

mjgoins• 16 years ago

Actually those measures are popular among regular (meaning non-powerful) people. Both the left and the right are in favor of a non-interventionist foreign policy in the US.

eru• 16 years ago

Some (or even most) potential terrorist attacks can be prevent. But not all.

jrockway4• 16 years ago

I don't really get this. How many people can name their representatives or senators? My guess is about 10%. If they don't know who you are, they can't blame you for terrorist attacks.

(I know, your opponents and the media can blame you. Just mention something about how you're against gay marriage, or something, and people will forget all about terrorism...)

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

They know who their senator is after his opponent starts flooding the airwaves with "$SENATOR name voted against protecting american citizens" overlayed against video of a terrorist attack.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack.

Or, the courts knock it down as unconstitutional.

jeromec4• 16 years ago

And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right. So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

andreyf• 16 years ago

This is not a new phenomenon: JFK even wrote a book about it, titled "Profiles in Courage": The book profiles senators who crossed party lines and/or defied the public opinion of their constituents to do what they felt was right and suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity because of their actions. [1]

So sometimes the right thing to do is the unpopular thing. But that's not new. While democracy is great at preventing certain abuses of power which clearly hurt the populace at large. Hence, it is also good at preventing violent uprising. So while it comes up with good solutions to some problems, the democratic process we have doesn't come up with the right solution to every problem, terrorism being a good example. This notion is much older than JFK, of course. One purpose of the Bill of Rights was explicitly anti-democratic: put in a general way, it prohibits the majority from oppressing inherent rights of minorities.

In theory, it is the role of the courts to strike down such laws as unconstitutional. In practice, this doesn't seem to happen very quickly, Japanese internment serving as one historical comparison [2]. But the sky has not fallen, former transgressions were greater, and like them, this too, shall pass.

What is novel about the current political climate in the US, as far as I can tell, is the extent of the influence money has in politics, and the magnitude of such money being spent. The best chronicle of this I've read is "So Much Damned Money" [3]. This is a problem worth fretting over.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiles_in_Courage

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

3. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307266540

tybris• 16 years ago

So much damned money that someone apparently bought the rights to the ancient word "corruption" and prevents people from using it. It's bad for business.

viggity• 16 years ago

For the record, the United States interned first generation Japanese-Americans, Italian-Americans and German-Americans. They were still denied due process which is definitely unfortunate, but they weren't interned because of the color of their skin. I think that is what a lot of people hint at by always mentioning the Japanese internment, but not mentioning Italian or German.

The internment of these German-Americans almost certainly saved American lives by denying the German American Bund Party (Nazi Sympathizers) from being able to engage in espionage and sabotage.

Furthermore, I have a problem calling them internment camps considering how completely different they were from the kind of internment camps the Nazi's ran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American_internment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_internment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Relocation_Authority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund

endtime• 16 years ago

> Israel is much smaller and they've tried much harder and they can't prevent them so the U.S. stands very little chance.

Actually, Israel has mostly prevented them. They still get rockets shot at them (which they probably could stop if they didn't have any ethical constraints), but suicide bombings have mostly stopped, and not for lack of attempts.

cmelbye• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, there's a lot of problems similar to that also. The national debt, for example. No one will elect a politician that says "I'm going to work to cut government programs and raise taxes so that we can pay off our debt."

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

It might be a failure of courage by our representatives; or maybe there are too many irons in the fire to get this done right. Not necessary to conjure up conspiracies, plenty of ordinary human reasons for this to take too long.

gnosis3• 16 years ago

You know, the Democrats didn't have to renew the PATRIOT Act at all.

If they were serious about protecting civil liberties that's just what they'd do. And the Republicans couldn't have stopped them.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

I don't know why anyone pretends that these people actually care anymore. They're there to get money and power, and to make sure they can get it again when they go up for re-election. They want to be everything to everyone, which leads to big problems because you can't do one thing without pissing off someone, so then they do the other thing too, but in amounts just enough that neither side will freak out too much, and just so that the Reps can claim to support whatever suits their campaign.

Take the health care bill, for instance. It doesn't do anything helpful, just forces everyone to pay for a private insurance policy. Republicans can say they protected business, Democrats can say they reformed health care and everyone now has access, businesspeople stay happy and their money keeps pouring in, normal people are hoodwinked into believing their side did whatever it was they wanted, and this cycle perpetuates.

jsz0• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm a defeatist but Patriot Act or no Patriot Act I believe they're just going to do this stuff anyway. These intelligence organizations aren't really held accountable often to the public for their actions. Just look at all the shady stuff they've done over the decades -- and that's just the stuff we know about. Who knows what really goes on inside the NSA or CIA? If they're out to get you I really doubt laws are going to save you. We know for an absolute fact this stuff was happening before the Patriot Act was law. Who went to jail? Was the President who permitted it held accountable? Nope. Were a significant number of the Representatives and Senators who voted for the Patriot Act expelled from office by voters? Nope. Maybe America is getting what it deserves. It looks like civil liberty violations are going to have to get much worse before Americans turn off their TVs and put down their Big Macs and actually care about the issue. The solution won't be so simple as repealing the Patriot Act either.

lallysingh3• 16 years ago

The Patriot problem isn't going anytime soon. The levels of surveillance enabled by modern technology were going to get used, somehow, by governments.

Counterterrorism is just the manifesting justification of this inevitability.

The debate on privacy -- or more accurately, the debate on the inflection point between real safety vs real privacy -- will be long and hard. It's a complex question that hasn't had an answer settled by any means.

My guess is that it's going to take a lot of work by folks like Wikileaks and the courts to make understood how the power is really being used. Only after a few cycles of (massive-problem -> privacy regulation) are we going to see some rational work in this area.

Sadly this is probably the only way it can happen; there just isn't any real data on what levels of privacy are appropriate with a civilization built on current levels of cyber-interconnection.

theschwa2• 16 years ago

Where can I find a list of the people who voted against the renewal? It's turning out to be harder to find than I had thought.

theschwa2• 16 years ago

It took me a while, but for anyone else who is interested this explains a bit why it's hard to find the voting record http://bit.ly/92Qfz4 and this is the roll call for the vote which also shows the break down for each party http://bit.ly/cVkRiC

Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections

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