Patriot Act

Patriot Act Dangers

On October 30, 2005, I went on to Timesunion.com and found an Article called Patriot Act Dangers. It sounded interesting when I read a brief summary of the article concerning new powers to be added to the Patriot Act, so I decided to print the article. The Patriot Act completely destroys the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment protects US citizens from unlawful search and seizures. Under the Fourth Amendment, search warrants are only to be issued when there is "probable cause". The warrant must be specific as to what place is being searched and, or what persons or things are going to be seized.

The Patriot Act gives the government power to go into your home while you are not there, copy your hard drive, retrieve files, or whatever else they desire without ever giving you notice and without a search warrant. Now, the FBI wants even more power, including access to all kinds of personal records, including: library, medical, gun, financial and others. With this power, they won't have to prove that the search is linked to terrorism, and they won't even have to have a judge's approval.

Another power that the FBI is seeking, "is secret searches of homes and businesses for indefinite periods." The FBI has already had 113 violations during recent surveillance investigations. If congress grants the FBI more power, then I'm sure those violations are going to increase. The FBI and CIA already have enough intelligence to act on, they just fail to do so. It even appears that the atrocities that occurred on September 11, 2001 may have been averted had the government acted on the intelligence they had already attained.

If the FBI is permitted, by the USA Patriot Act, to violate the fourth amendment, then it appears that in a manner of speaking terrorists would have won. Both the Senate and the House are debating what