By Ben Chase

Forty-five days after the United States was sent reeling from the attacks of Sept. 11th, Congress passed emergency legislation known as the Patriot Act, expanding the powers of the federal government to “prevent domestic terrorism”. For once, the political landscape was devoid of partisanship. Political scrutiny was replaced by unequivocal patriotism and the Patriot Act cruised through the Senate with a 98-1 vote.

Yet within a few months of the Senate vote, Anti-Patriot Act movements spread across the country. The patriotic fervor that had swept the country in the wake of Sept. 11th, was suddenly replaced by an explosion of outrage over what appeared to be an Orwellian-like path. College campuses across the nation erupted in protests as student governments began passing out anti-Patriot Act resolutions. Stoking the fires of these grass root campaigns were passionate civil activists like Sheena Bellows—a national field organizer for the civil liberties watchdog American Civil Liberties Union—that proclaimed, “Parts of the [Patriot Act] undermine our Bill of Rights.”

The Justice Department has another theory. “There was a lot of misinformation out there,” explained Mark Corallo, the director of Public Affairs for the Justice Department. “The Patriot Act has been blamed for a lot of things it does not cover in reality.” The handling of those who were detained and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, new airport security measures of color coding passengers according to their risk factor are just two examples Corallo gave as public confusion over the Patriot Act.

What everyone does understand is that The Patriot Act is an amalgam of amendments to an already existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which was passed during the Carter administration to help monitor foreign spies operating within the United States. The other thing that is well understood is that all prosecutions against violators of The Patriot Act are held in FISA courts, and they are held in secret.

Yet it is the word secret that lies at the very core of the public’s paranoia surrounding any discussion of The Patriot Act. “The corner stone of our legal system and democracy is open government,” said Bellows. “People have got to feel like they know what their government is doing.”

Events like the one that occurred in the spring of 2003, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst caused students to become outraged when they learned that an Iraqi-born economics professor had been interviewed by someone he thought was a campus detective, but who was really a local FBI agent. This is what is driving the public’s distrust and suspicion that government is being a little too covert conducting operations under The Patriot Act. While the FBI’s actions were not illegal, Bellows said, “The government’s attitude has been trust us because we’re the government. And I’m afraid that that just isn’t enough.”

The concern over The Patriot Act lies in sections 213 and 215, which grant law enforcement with easier access to additional powers. It is sections 213 and 215 that have caused the discontent amongst those who are worried about how these sections compromise the principles on which our democracy was founded. These fears are perpetuated by a sense that The patriot Act pushes the limits of how much privacy Americans are willing to give up to feel secure.

Section 213 of the Patriot Act encompasses the government’s ability to search your home without telling you. Before the Patriot Act, federal law enforcement could conduct searches without informing the individual, but only if notification would cause “a flight risk, a threat to human life, or evidence tampering.” However since the enactment of The Patriot Act, the term “adverse results to the investigation” has been added. The ACLU’s website charges “this small semantic amendment side steps our basic right to protection from unlawful search and seizure as guaranteed by the 4th amendment.”

Similarly, section 215 seems to make it easier for the government to gain access to our private records by amending the definition of terrorism. Under the original FISA, terrorism was limited to criminal offenses that were “dangerous to human life”, or “violated the laws of the United States or any other state”. What the Patriot Act effectively added was the seemingly non-offensive stipulations that those terrorism acts could be defined as acts that “appear to be intended to influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion”. Bellows said that the, “[ACLU’s] fear is that ordinary protest acts could be constituted as terrorism under that definition.” And even if protestors were not imprisoned under that definition, it could be enough to make their private records available to inspection by federal law enforcement.

The back and forth nature of this debate rages on, as the Justice Department contends that the changes in language in The Patriot Act are the most important aspects of the bill. “Those provisions allow information sharing between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” said Corallo. Up until The Patriot Act, two prosecutors who were heading two different investigations on the same person could not pool information. “Here we were,” Curallo said, “we could talk to the FBI, we could talk to foreign intelligence agents, we could even talk to Al Qaeda informants who had flipped and were now helping. Yet, the guys we couldn’t talk to were the FBI counterintelligence guys who were just up one floor.”

However, according to reports recently declassified (October, 2003) by the Attorney General John Ashcroft, section 215 has not been used once in the conviction of a terrorist. So, why do we need it? The fact is that the effects of provisions like sections 213 and 215 are felt even if they are not implemented. “There is a chilling effect when folks feel that their records can be taken by the government and they won’t know,” said Bellows. “Will they begin to self censor or curb their behavior? This is where the real concerns over the Patriot Act are.”

Despite his concern about the public’s perceptions of The Patriot Act, Corallo is adamant in his belief that sections 213 and 215 are too important to the war against terrorism. “The Patriot Act has been one of the most important tools that congress gave us to prevent further terrorist attacks,” he said. “If those provisions are allowed to sunset in 2005, we will find ourselves in a situation where we are at pre-Sept.11th vulnerability and that is simply too great a risk.”