David Fry

The efforts to renew the Patriot Act were temporarily halted in the Senate, but will likely resurface soon.  Although it was initially enacted as a temporary trade of our essential liberties for a small measure of security, many on the right are hoping for a permanent shift.  At the time of the original drafting, many liberals felt it was just a law-enforcement wish-list given legs from the fear of terrorists, but its harshest provisions are still popular among conservatives, even while the post 9-11 hysteria has started to calm. Sadly, our own Democratic Representative Ed Case was among those who voted for the renewal. (He defends it while criticizing the President.) As you'd expect, Abercrombie voted against it.

I've been surprised at how many conservatives supported the Patriot Act though. As a long-time libertarian (and former Libertarian Party supporter), I've known many on the right who were afraid of gradual encroachment of rights -- creeping tyranny.  When gun-rights activists talk amongst themselves, its not hunting that motivates them, but their right to defend themselves and their country against criminals and tyrants. It's sad that the partisanship in Washington has divided the Bill of Rights between the two parties.  The Republican's take care of the 2nd and the 10th Ammendments, and the Democrats watch out for the 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th.

The news of this last week has been particularly disturbing. The President has admitted to wiretapping Americans without a warrant.  Congress gave him every law-enforcement tool he ever asked for and he's still going outside the law. Congress gave him secret courts, lowered the requirements for evidence, and even granted a 72-hour emergency measure that lets them wiretap untill they can get a warrant. Obviously the President wanted wiretaps on grounds so shaky that even the Secret Courts wouldn't grant them. The 4th ammendment is pretty clear, and the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to restrict the power of the executive branch to abuse the rights of the citizens.

The President's defense of this has been weak and off-topic.  He's claimed Constitutional authority to operate outside the law. He's claimed it was needed for emergencies.  Mainly he's blamed the New York Times for letting the American people know that their President has gone off the deep-end.  I blame the New York Times too -- they sat on this story for a full year under pressure from the administration.

This same week, a student at Dartmouth was visited by Federal agents after requesting Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book on inter-library loan.  Apparently he was flagged because he'd also done some international travel. We now know that the government is monitoring library books, and not in a one-at-a-time, case-by-case basis.  It appears that they are intercepting library data and cross-checking it with other sources to build risk-profiles on all Americans. DARPA had started a program to build a system like this, the total Information Awareness system, later renamed Terrorist Information Awareness.  It was orignially run by Iran-Contra creep John Poindexter, who resigned  amid public outcry over privacy issues. All funding for TIA was eliminated late in 2003, but the system lives on.

I guess when the President swore to "preserve and protect the Consititution of the United States", he must have thought they were talking about the parchment. For what its worth, its still secure in its glass case in the National Archives.