More Scandal Than You Can Handle

Patriot Act

Page history last edited by Leonard 3 yrs ago

Patriot Act

Colloquial term for the USA-PATRIOT Act, the Patriot Act was passed in the heady days of October 2001, when everybody was flipping their shit over whether or not terrorists where going to drop a nuclear bomb onto the cupola of the Senate building and then smear anthrax on the survivor's faces as they were crawling away. Most decisions made while in the grip of fear are not particularly well-thought-out ones, and USA-PATRIOT is no exception.

The Patriot Act has given nearly unprecedented powers to law enforcement agencies, and as is the case roughly 100% of the time with law enforcement agencies that have been given additional powers, these powers have been abused from the very start. Intended to increase the ability of law enforcement to combat terrorism, the Patriot Act has been largely used to fight more run-of-the-mill criminals like drug dealers, animal rights activists and librarians, none of whom have, as of yet, flown a plane into a skyscraper and killed thousands of people. Critics and civil rights activists (or, as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft put it, "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty") claim that it makes hash of the rights to privacy, due process, free speech, and a free press; ne'er-do-well activist judges, who apparently aren't spending their time sending criminals to prison like they should be, have ruled that it is in substantial violation of the First (Sections 215 and 805), Fourth (Sections 215 and 505), Sixth and Eighth (Section 215) Amendments to the Constitution. Luckily, the Supreme Court has kept itself busy hearing cases by people like Anna Nicole Smith, and has not yet been able to hear any crazy arguments that a substantial portion of standing federal law subverts the legal protections upon which American society is based. Whew!

This delightful piece of legislation (and its sequel Patriot II, which did less box office but still had boffo opening weekend all over the country) has been compared to such golden classics as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Sedition Act of 1918, the COINTELPRO program in the 1960s, and, of course, the Reichstag Fire Decree of 1933. Curiously, some terrorism experts in academia say that one of the primary goals of the terrorist is to provoke their target governments into passing bad legislation, in effect proving the terrorist's point that the government is dangerous and oppressive. But who cares what a bunch of eggheads think?

USA-PATRIOT, in case you were wondering, stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". No, really!