What Price Patriotism? / The new USA Patriot Act treads upon the same freedoms it purports to protect

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(11-15) 04:00 PST San Francisco, California, USA -- Open up any US newspaper these days and you'll be awash with exhaustive details on airline-security flubs, terrorist arrests and Afghanistan-bombing reports. Even reports of people exposed to anthrax -- a phenomenon unlikely to physically affect the average reader -- are given their fair share of ink daily. Why is it, then, that a bill that fundamentally and drastically limits the online privacy Americans have come to expect from their Internet service providers was passed almost without media notice?

Congress handily and swiftly passed the USA Patriot Act on Oct. 24 with little debate, almost no public comment and scant media attention. It's probably a darned good thing for Congress, too, because if the public understood how insidiously the act could encroach on their privacy, and if they remembered the fallout from Cointelpro (the counterintelligence program in the 1960s and '70s that allowed the Feds to sniff around in citizens' private lives), there might have been outcry aplenty.

But first things first: The USA Patriot Act -- the act's name is actually an acronym that stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" -- is a complicated bill that spells out the Feds' rights to monitor electronic communications like e-mail and Web surfing. Reading and understanding all 1,016 sections of the legalese-clogged act is difficult, especially since its provisions roam into diverse areas such as border controls and enacting trade sanctions against countries that harbor terrorists.

The act also contains some worrisome new legislation that boils down to this: Any employee of the federal executive branch can monitor the electronic communications of any individual or group that is relevant to any federal case. The case doesn't have to concern terrorism, nor does the executive-branch ...

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/g/a/2001/11/15/patriotisp.DTL

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/g/a/2001/11/15/patriotisp.DTL