Liability
Locked Account.
I'll be the turd in the punch bowl....
Are there any cases of actual rights being violated?
I see the patriot act as a tool for law enforcement to watch potential bad guys. The bad guys have to 1st contact bad guys outside the US or known bad guys in the US.
I have been a bit worried about it being used by a rougue administration though.... not mentioning any names, but their initials are Barak Hussein Obama
The potential for the misuse or the abuse of laws that were already on the books PRIOR to 9/11/2001 existed in the past and will go on existing.
Are there some heightened RISKS associated with the USA PATRIOT Act, as amended? Of course.
Are these RISKS of misuse and abuse reason enough to forgo the prospect of granting our national security infrastructure the tools needed to meet the demands of protecting this Republic against the threat of shitheads like al qaeda? Nope.
Proper mechanisms to put some checks and balances into effect is what's needed, and they already exist.
The claims that the Patriot Act's provisions somehow violate the Constitution are essentially just so much hot air. They are nonsense.
This would be exhibit A of a person with infinite faith in bureacrats using all the power we give them for good and not evil.
Just give them whatever power they need, as surely someone as noble as a US bureacrat would never overstep their bounds and would purely use the power as a means to fight off evil doers and save us americans who could be blown up at any second if we don't give them this power.
Wrong, Dr. Dreck. Disagreeing with you is hardly the hallmark of a person who has infinite faith in our government or its bureaucrats.
If you had the ability to post honestly and think clearly (attributes you have not demonstrated) you would have noted that I spoke of justified concerns and the NEED for checks and balances. None of that indicates any kind of boundless faith.
There are already reporting requirements. CONGRESS already oversees how the PATRIOT Act gets used. And there is a special Court in place already that reviews the uses to which FISA gets put.
The point I am making (and have made on many occasions in the past -- even though thoughtless clowns like you are unable to intelligently address the point) is that BEFORE 9/11/2001, there were already laws on the books that allowed for wiretapping. Yeah, warrants were required. But how were warrants obtained? Usually through the application process requiring that law enforcement swear out the nature of the case and known facts in testimony or in affidavits. Does that mean that the sworn applications couldn't have been false? Few would ever know unless -- on some occasions -- the warrants got used, arrests got made, cases went to trial and the criminal procedure discovery process led to legal challenges and hearings complete with cross examination. In those relatively rare cases, discrepancies might get revealed. But otherwise, the process was ripe for abuse.
DO you imagine that nobody ever got a wiretap without lying? Do you imagine that wiretaps were never secured without complying with the warrant requirement?
Similarly, "law enforcement*" authorities still have to get appropriate permissions and provide adequate records for the review of those cases where the PATRIOT Act has been utilized. And there are, like in the past, mechanism in place to perform some checks and provide some balances. Imperfect? Probably. So? That gets me back to the actual question I posed -- the one you chose to ignore with your propagandistic diatribe. IS THAT sufficient ground to remove this important tool from our national security infrastructure?
If your answer is" YES!" then you surely think that there should be no such thing as even court authorized wiretaps since THAT process can lead to abuse, too. IS that what you "think," Dr. Dreck?
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* And this doesn't even address the concern that sometimes the uses to which we may want to put the USA PATRIOT Act are not related to mere criminal "law enforcement" at all. For some reason, lots of libs like to forget that the 9/11 Commission noted that one of the problems that made 9/11 possible was the idiotic and artificially forced separation of "law enforcement" from national security type "intelligence."