Sunday, September 21, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: The ever-expanding Patriot Act

Critics warned the expanded police powers authorized by the so-called Patriot Act -- ratified just weeks after the terror attacks of Sept. 11 -- would soon be used by opportunistic cops and prosecutors in areas far afield from any threat of al-Qaida-style terrorism.

Nonsense, supporters replied. New government powers to read every e-mail passing through an Internet Service Provider; to conduct roving wiretaps without informing their victims; to snoop on our book buying and library borrowing habits; to secretly rake through our private financial data; to "enhance" criminal sentences till they stretch for decades ... would be used only when necessary to prevent for "another Sept. 11."

Guess what.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," reports Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism; then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."

Well ... so what? If some moron in California finds himself charged with "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" when he wounds himself because his pipe bomb exploded in his lap, if a North Carolina prosecutor charges the proprietor of a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law against "manufacture of chemical weapons," hoping to send him up for 12 years to life instead of the standard six months ... they're all criminals, right? Who should shed a tear if the authorities now have new tools to use against them?

Except that:

• In the June 27 edition of "The Nation," Jonah Engle reports, "Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com's director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph Sullivan, offered law-enforcement officials extensive access to personal customer information," all, Mr. Sullivan helpfully offered, "without having to produce a court order."

Why this sudden spirit of cooperation?

"September 11th changed things dramatically," Nimrod Kozlovski of Yale's Information Society Project told The Nation. "EBay has itself felt the sting of tough new laws: On March 28 its PayPal unit was charged by the Justice Department with violating the Patriot Act for providing money transfer services to gambling companies. ... In this political climate, being pliant to law enforcement may be sound business. ..."

• In a July 17 article in Atlanta's alternative newsweekly "Creative Loafing," Marc Schultz, a bearded young journalism student in Atlanta, describes being visited and interviewed by FBI agents who were tipped off by an anonymous snitch that he'd been seen reading a suspicious newspaper article while waiting in line at a local coffee house.

Schultz described the piece he was seen reading as "this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media ... really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11."

The editors of the alternative weekly identified the crime for which Mr. Schultz was investigated by the FBI as "reading while bearded."

• David Socha, a 17-year-old on his way to Hawaii, was arrested in July at Logan Airport in Boston and charged with a felony for having a note in his gym bag which read: "(Expletive) you. Stay the (expletive) out of my bag you (expletive) sucker. Have you found a (expletive) bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so (expletive) you."

No, the young man's outrage over the suspension of his Fourth Amendment rights was not particularly prudent -- though I'm glad to see some of the spirit of John and Samuel Adams survives.

But should he really have been arrested and charged with "making a terrorist threat"? What threat? And what has happened to our First Amendment rights? Young Mr. Socha's protected political statement was zipped inside his own luggage.

• The President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service is even urging the Postal Service to create "smart stamps," to track the identity of people sending mail.

"USPS already offers mail-tracking services to corporate customers," reports Alorie Gilbert of CNET News.com. "The (Commission) proposes a broad expansion of the concept to all mail for national security purposes."

"We have a long history in this country of anonymous political speech," comments Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Any change that removes anonymity from the public mail system is "making a major change to political discourse in this country," he said.

Only impacting criminals?

And they're not done. President Bush last week endorsed a proposal by Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., which would allow the Justice Department to expand the use of "administrative subpoenas," gathering up books, papers, documents and electronic data, free of frustrating judicial supervision or the need to make a case before any grand jury -- whereupon the subjects of such subpoenas would be barred from telling anyone but their own lawyers about them ... guaranteeing we won't even know how much of this is going on.

The administration also wants to remove the right to be freed on bond of those accused -- not convicted, mind you, merely accused -- of anything the government calls "terrorism."

And when are these "temporary" suspensions of our rights likely to end? No one will say.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is http://www.privacyalert.us.