Renewing the Patriot Act

Several key provisions of the Patriot Act, which expanded law enforcement power in the aftermath of 9/11, are due to expire at the end of the year. The president is pushing for Congress to renew those provisions, arguing that they have helped make the US safer from terrorists. But one of the problems in the Patriot Act, apart from questions about civil liberties, is that the powers granted to law enforcement are not strictly constrained to terrorist investigation. In 2003, the FBI used the Patriot Act to get information on a strip club owner in Las Vegas as part of a corruption investigation. The Drug Policy Alliance cites a "report by internal investigators at the Justice Department allegedly identifies dozens of cases where drug violations, credit card fraud and bank theft crimes have been investigated and prosecuted under the PATRIOT Act." The Free Expression Policy Project reports that hundreds of libraries across the nation had reported contacts from FBI agents, some of which the Justice Department admits were for "ordinary criminal cases rather than national security cases."

Whatever one may think of the Patriot Act's value to stopping terrorism, it should be clear that the law has been crafted to grant powers far beyond that goal and should therefore be rewritten to more clearly restrict its provisions to the task it was created for.