September 10, 2003
Slate's Guide to the Patriot Act
With tomorrow's anniversary of 9/11, John Ashcroft wrapping up his national tour for promoting the USA Patriot Act, and President Bush asking for more authority under what is being called the first of several Patriot-II laws, I highly recommend people go read Dahlia Lithwick and Julia Turner's four-part series, A Guide to the Patriot Act, published in Slate. Lithwick and Turner manage to cut through the spin-doctoring on both sides of the debate, presenting the more controversial parts of the Act without shilling for one side or the other, but while still presenting their own analysis and thoughtful interpretation. It's a breath of fresh air, cutting between punditry and objective-to-a-fault reporting-without-analysis:
How bad is Patriot, really? Hard to tell. 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.
The truth of the matter seems to be that while some portions of the Patriot Act are truly radical, others are benign. Parts of the act formalize and regulate government conduct that was unregulated — and potentially even more terrifying — before. Other parts clearly expand government powers and allow it to spy on ordinary citizens in new ways. But what is most frightening about the act is exacerbated by the lack of government candor in describing its implementation. FOIA requests have been half-answered, queries from the judiciary committee are blown off or classified. In the absence of any knowledge about how the act has been used, one isn't wrong to fear it in the abstract — to worry about its potential, since that is all we can know.
Ashcroft and his supporters on the stump cite a July 31 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll showing that 91 percent of registered voters say the act had not affected their civil liberties. One follow-up question for them: How could they know?
If you haven't read all 300-plus pages of the legislation by now, you should.
Since I haven't read all 300-plus pages of the legislation myself, I won't tell you to do so. But I will tell you to go and read Lithwick and Turner's guide.
References
- Ashcroft 'Patriot Act' Tour Ends Near WTC Site (Grant McCool, Reuters, 9 September 2003)
- USA PATRIOT Act as Passed by Congress (25 October 2001)
- President Seeks More Anti-Terror Authority: Congress Asked to Widen Patriot Act (Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 11 September 2003)
- A Guide to the Patriot Act: Should you be scared of the Patriot Act? (Dahlia Lithwick and Julia Turner, Slate, 8-11 September 2003)
[Note from Bug: I just turned on HTML for comments, and fixed the settings so the comments will come out formatted. Sorry about not having it on before!]
Thanks for the pointer to the Slate series --
it's a good article on an mportant topic.
Coincidentally, I've just finished reading John
Locke's "Second Treatise on Government," and the
conjunction has brought out the following rant.
[Hey, my html gets stripped out and I can't find any way to insert paragraph
breaks in here, so I'll have to use these comments in square braces]
Point 1 --- Being an engineer at heart, when I read
the U.S. Constitution I try to figure out exactly
how the design works. I think it's pretty
clear the Founding Fathers had the goal of
maximizing personal freedom, and their main method
was to design a system of government in which the
government had to trust the people, and the people had to put
minimal trust in the government. In summary, goal:
freedom; tool: invert the traditional trust
relationship. Since this had never been done
before, the FFs set up sort of an experiment. They wrote
the Articles of Confederation and tried to live under
them. That experiment failed after a few years,
so they tried another experiment, writing the
Constitution. That experiment is more or less
ongoing. [end paragraph]
Point 2 --- You'll often see this quote attributed to
Benjamin Franklin: "He who trades liberty for security,
deserves neither." The real quote goes:
"He who gives up essential liberty for a little
temporary security deserves neither liberty nor
security." Notice all those extra qualifications
and weasel words! John Locke argues irrefutably
that the whole purpose for leaving the State of
Nature and accepting the rules of a community is
to exchange some freedom for some security.
[end paragraph]
So when we get beyond all the demagoguery, the real
debate that goes on in communities of all sizes is
how to trade off freedom and security. And maybe
how to allow the next generation the freedom to
make their own choices after we've made ours (in
defense of the Patriot Act, most of its more
radical clauses expire in 2005 -- that's what
Ashcroft is lobbying to extend). And
the real tragedy of the Patriot Act is that it
inspires practically zero debate. Yes, the
librarians have taken a stand, but the punditry is
woefully silent on the subject. Where are the
New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall
Street Journal when we really need them?