"PATRIOT" Act challenged -- more from the PI

[unixronin]

The Seattle PI reports that while George Bush wants to renew the PATRIOT Act (and even make it permanent), a wide-ranging coalition including Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, the ACLU, Americans For Tax Reform, the American Conservative Union and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has urged significant changes.  Sections of the PATRIOT Act challenged by the group, "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances", include:

• Section 213, aka the "sneak and peek" provision, allowing federal agents to secretly search people's homes and businesses without any deadline on giving notice that the intrusion had taken place, in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment;
• Section 215, which allows federal agents to collect personal data (including medical history, library books checked out, and goods purchased) on American citizens without evidence of any connection to terrorism;
• Section 802, which defines "terrorism" so broadly that "Ordinary people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights on issues across the political spectrum might get charged as terrorists" under the law's definition.

Newly appointed US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is quoted as saying that the PATRIOT act has been "mischaracterized" by "a small but vocal minority", and claims that not a single civil rights abuse has occurred under the PATRIOT Act.  (For the right definitions of "civil", "rights", "abuse", "not", and "occurred", I'm sure.)  And if you believe that, I have this bridge in Brooklyn that I can make you a GREAT deal on....

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It'll clearly never be demonstrated that she ordered it, or she'd have been thrown to the wolves at the time. My recollection, for which I can produce no references, is that approval for use of military force and the whole high-impact conduct of the operation came down from her, despite the local sheriff repeatedly saying "Look, all this is totally unnecessary, I know Koresh, he's a good man, if you'd just have let me go and talk to him he'd have walked out peacefully with me." But Reno and the ATF wanted to Make An Example.

(It's not like he'd even committed any active crime ... the justification for the whole thing was just a dispute over whether he owned any firearms he needed to pay a $200 Class III tax on, and iirc, BATF didn't even have hard evidence that he even had any Class III firearms -- they merely asserted that they believed him to have been assembling them.)