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Special to the Times Leader
It’s several hundred pages long and covers subjects as diverse as telephone taps, access to business records, money laundering, monitoring of foreign students, cyberterrorism, seizure of voice-mail messages and discrimination against Muslims.
It’s the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, also known as the Patriot Act. Its purpose, according to the act itself, is “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.”
It’s the “other purposes” part that has left many civil rights advocates uncomfortable. Although designed to deter terrorism after 9-11, the act also introduced a slew of legislative changes that significantly increased the surveillance and investigative powers of law enforcement agencies in the United States.
Some fear the act, coupled with increased monitoring of anti-war demonstrators by the FBI, signals a return to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when government agents routinely spied on political protesters and harassed individuals exercising their First Amendment rights.
But U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pittsburgh, who voted for the Patriot Act, says, “It’s funny, but I haven’t gotten any complaints at the office from anybody who thinks their rights have been abused by it. To me, all we’re doing is applying the same laws that right now apply to mobsters, to terrorists.”
Those laws are expanding. Recently, Congress added a provision to the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2004 that grants the FBI greater authority to seize records in terrorism investigations, according to EPIC, a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. The provision, EPIC says, permits the FBI to obtain records without judicial approval from car dealers, pawnbrokers, travel agents, casinos and other businesses.
Kingston Township police officer Martin C. Maransky attended a seminar on the act with a number of other local law enforcement officers. Maransky, a member of a computer crimes task force, says the act “kind of took us by surprise.”
“It gives us a lot of power,” he says. “The Patriot Act is another way for us to get information. We can get search warrants for information from companies or owners of computers. There’s things we didn’t even realize we had access to.”
FBI officials have said their intelligence-gathering regarding anti-war demonstrators was aimed at identifying anarchists and “extremist elements” plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters. The FBI also specifically mentioned the Internet, noting that protesters “often use the internet to recruit, raise funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations.”
Susan Hanley, a member of Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Scranton-based peace group, says the FBI can check her communications any time. “It’s not anything new, is it? It’s disturbing, but if they want to, let them listen. Nothing we advocate would cause a problem.”
ON THE NET
To review the Patriot Act, go to: www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/usapatriot/