ACLU Drops Challenge Over Patriot Act 274
An anonymous reader writes, "The ACLU announced on Friday that they were dropping their case against the US Government over the highly contested section 215 of the Patriot Act. ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson stated: 'While the reauthorized Patriot Act is far from perfect, we succeeded in stemming the damage from some of the Bush administration's most reckless policies. The ACLU will continue to monitor how the government applies the broad Section 215 power and we will challenge unconstitutional demands on a case-by-case basis.'"
Re:"Reauthorized" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So this is how the ACLU Says: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there any evidence that there are fewer institutional barriers to cooperation and coordination? Because if the rest of the agencies effected by the Patriot Act were reorganized like FEMA was, i don't feel very confident that the changes made to the US government are of any use at all.
Also, there is a difference between policy consensus, and the reality of implementation. (for instance, integrating national crime databases, sounds like a great idea, but apparently this isn't an IT project the government could handle building)
Re:So this is how the ACLU Says: (Score:4, Insightful)
Like the Republicans who currently control the purse strings wouldn't have found a way to increase government expenditures and take money out of your pocket.
You know, like wanting to prosecute Jose Padilla as a terrorist, holding this american citizen in jail for three years without counsel then dropping all terror related charges and finally settling on a charge of aiding terrorists in a civil, not military, court.
Seems that the government knew its case wasn't going to fly so it settled on lesser charges and claimed victory. After spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money on legal fees on a case they couldn't win.
Here's a thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
So maybe they did the math. Lose the right to privacy en masse or gain a little bit o' facism.
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:1, Insightful)
Now you might argue that this came at the cost of liberties, which I totally dispute. However, to say that the USA PATRIOT Act has accomplished nothing flies in the face of the last several years of demonstrable safety in the homeland versus terrorist attacks.
You must remember, the USA PATRIOT Act is largely just an adaptation of the RICO Act, extending it to those involved in terrorism. There were some limitations on law enforcement which prevented them from preventing terrorism. Some of those limitations have been modified by the USA PATRIOT Act to allow law enforcement to more properly function in this arena. That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
How much safer? Up for debate. Does it erode freedoms in the process? Up for debate. Has it made us safer? Obviously.
Clinton's watch (Score:3, Insightful)
To state that it has made us safer is up for debate as well. There is no proof that it done its job.
Re:So this is how the ACLU Says: (Score:3, Insightful)
People may originally get into politics for noble reasons but, eventually, it becomes about "doing business." And whether they are Republicans or Democrats it makes no difference. Eventually the media-government-business complex will select from among the candidates that they can "do business" with (sorry for ending my sentence with a preposition). What, you thought that you actually had a choice? Get real.
Like the old saw goes, power corrupts. But what gets me is these self-righteous A-holes who honestly think they they wouldn't be corrupted by it.
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:4, Insightful)
I wore a red shirt yesterday and a green shirt today. It was colder yesterday than it is today. Therefore, wearing a green shirt makes the temperature warmer.
How is this reasoning any different than yours? Correlation does not imply causation [tamu.edu]
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:2, Insightful)
1995 -> 2001 didn't have any significant terrorist attacks either. Change to 1996-2001 if you prefer to include the Unabomber as significant during that time period, though I'd argue that you'd then need to include the November 2001 anthrax-letter attacks (insignificant as they were, they were more so than late-period Unabomber IMO).
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:2, Insightful)
Virtually no Americans have died in America from terrorist attacks following implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Virtually no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to the Patriot Act, either, excepting one particular day in September. I am far more inclined to attribute the relative safety of the past 5 years to status quo than to some hastily and ill-conceived piece of legislation, but that's just me.
That we are safer from terrorism as a result is obvious.
This is not obvious to me. That the Act mandates better comms between the alphabet soup agencies is a Good Thing, but at what cost? How many freedoms and liberties lost or curtailed? How much indignity? How much opacity added to the process?
I mean, do you really feel safer when Gatorade is banned from airline flights? I think the continuous fostering of unfounded paranoia does us more regular damage. After all, if the point of terrorism is to make us feel fear and thereby use it as a weapon, and that is bad, then I can see no good in the fear mongering of our own elected officials. That is the real and continuing cost of 9/11.
Re:Patriot Pieties (Score:2, Insightful)
Now if we can (Score:1, Insightful)
Its all find and dandy that the ACLU is trying to protect my civil liberties but when they are pushing to have a cross on the side of a road where someone has died be removed or pushing to have a stone ten commandments be removed, how are these civil liberties away from anyone? Also the ACLU standing up and demanding that all prisoners of war, regardless of what they did be released if the evidence against them is not made public.
the ACLU needs to be investigated in my opinion.
Re:Now if we can (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So this is how the ACLU Says: (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't you use this argument to discontinue the wasteful and inefficient practice of holding elections?
Re:Habeus Corpus (Score:5, Insightful)
It says "no person," not "no citizen" or "no non-combatant" or anything else. It means no person, period. That includes Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and Satan himself. In other words, your "clarification" is explicitly unconstitutional!
You betcha! What, are you afraid he'd somehow manage to win anyway? Don't you have any confidence in our laws and the ability of the US prosecution to put forth enough evidence to convict him?
Re:Now if we can (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that displays of crosses on the right of way of the road, which is government owned land, and the display of religious artifacts such as monuments to the ten commandments amount to an apparent endorsement, by the government, of religion, said religion almost always being Christianity. For example, I do not recall a single instance of seeing Shiva in a house of legislature, a voodoo altar at an accident site, or a monument to Ayn Rand on a courthouse lawn. When we talk about the US government's sponsorship of religion, It is Christianity first, last, and always.
Now, if some farmer wants to put up crosses in his field, or a church wants to put up religious monuments on church property, or any private citizen wants to erect a shrine to whomever, these are all examples of free expression by the citizens and as such, they are what the constitution seems to be worded to protect. It would be very difficult, I think, to read the first amendment as anything but encouraging the citizen and discouraging the government with regard to religious expression.
Remember the times: This country was founded by people who had been ruthlessly suppressed by the British government because the religion they followed was not that of the state. In 1789, when James Madison introduced the first tentative bill of rights, feelings were very strong that one religious sect or another must not gain religious control of the people through the mechanism of the government.
Madison's suggestion regarding religion read as follows:
That was whittled down to this:
This final version of this idea prevents the establishment of a national religion, and also prohibits government aid to any religion, even on an non-exclusive basis, or so the courts have said until very recently.
Now, there are state constitutions that read slightly differently; however, the supreme court has interpreted the due process clause of the 14th amendment to mean that states may not override this particular section of the bill of rights (the 1st amendment is part of the bill of rights.)
So this means that states shouldn't be putting religious symbols on road right of ways, either, nor should they be erecting monuments to any particular religion's artifacts, creeds, or personalities.
Remember: The bill of rights assigns rights to the people. It takes them away from the government. So you can't really argue that telling the government it can't erect religious artifacts suppressed the speech of the people based on the 1st amendment. It suppresses the ability of the government to tacitly or directly sponsor religion, and that is clearly what the intent of the framers was, not to mention the authors of the bill of rights. The problem, as always, is that when a government expresses a preference for a religion, those who do not follow that religion either are, or feel they are, being marginalized. This is a situation that it is very important to avoid, specifically so that no citizen's expression of religion is likely to be curtailed by concerns about how the government might react to that expression.
Finally, as the government's support of religion is almost exclusively Christian — crosses at the roadside, the ten commandments, Christmas displays, creches, etc. — it is clear that the current situation serves to discommode anyone who isn't a Christian. Therefore it would seem obvious, at least to me, that we have arrived at precisely the birthing of religious sponsorship the 1st amendment was designed to prevent us from getting to.
Y
You know... (Score:2, Insightful)
There's something going on if you can't tell the difference between different types of public land.
Roads are public in the COMMON sense - a cross memorialising someone who died on a particular stretch doesn't actually impose on anything besides things like "Hey, keep in mind some crap driver (maybe on something) killed a person here. Remember them, and, you know, heads up.". I would CERTAINLY remind my local ACLU chapter they have bigger fish to fry if they were going after any of these.
Courthouses are public in the sense of PUBLIC SECTOR. As in Government. This should go without saying, but I get the sensation it bears repeating here. Putting a stone tablature of the Commandments is problematic for a reason; namely that propping them in the rotunda of your local International House of Law acts as an implicit "We (the law) enforce this in these parts" (Which someone who actually cares about freedom of religion or right of consent SHOULD take issue with, or at least with the left half and possibly #7) and at worst serves as a state endorsement of religion (While not as bad as actually erecting a state religious sect, it's ALSO covered under 1st Amendment concerns).
Re:"Reauthorized" (Score:4, Insightful)
They weren't stupid, they were trying to hold onto their jobs. Vote against PATRIOT Act and in the next election, your opposition will campaign on it because you obviously 'are against keeping us SAFE', and in some cases 'want the terrists to WIN'.
Remember how they got the Federal ID law passed? They tailgated it on the back end of an appropriation bill reputedly to supply body armor to the troops in Iraq. You couldn't vote against the rider without voting for the appropriation. Would YOU want to face re-election when the opposition says 'Hey, he voted AGAINST body armor for our troops!!!'?
What really needs to happen is stopping the practice of putting riders on bills at the last minute. You can submarine all KINDS of nasty shit with the current system. Problem is, I don't see this happening. Ever.
Re:Habeus Corpus (Score:4, Insightful)
Who specifically are we at war with? That is to say, other than "the terrorists." Who do we have to kill or who has to surrender to end this war, bin Laden, the Taliban? The fact is, we are not at war in any meaningful sense of the word. We are at war only in the same sense that we are at war with drugs and poverty.
Re:"Reauthorized" (Score:3, Insightful)
Results-driven judges = badness. (Score:3, Insightful)
Roe rests on a rather silly argument. Rather than using any number of very good justifications for enabling abortion -- such as the equal protection clause, or better yet, just tossing it back to the legislature until public pressure forced the creation of a real "Right to Privacy" amendment -- the USSC created a legal fiction. Beginning with Griswold vs Connecticut, they constructed a 'phantom right,' using what's now called the "penumbra argument." Basically they said that the right to privacy is unwritten but assumed, and that it's necessary in order for the functional implementation of other enumerated rights. It's a plausible enough argument, but certainly not airtight. Compared to the logic underlying most other high court decisions, it's got flaming hoops of assumptions to jump through. It's the Evel Knievel of opinions: on one hand there's where you are, and on the other side is the result you want, and then -- holy shit, look at it go -- it stretches between the two.
The justices voting for the majority, being very smart and well-read people, (in my opinion) voted the way they did less because they were actually convinced of the correctness of the penumbra argument on strict jurisprudential grounds, than because they thought that to allow abortion was the Right Thing To Do at the time, and they figured out a way to make it happen. There is some merit to this approach -- public opinion at the time was in favor and if you looked at trends over the past decade or two, it looked as if society was on a straight, predictable path towards social liberalization. If the court had ruled otherwise, many would have felt that the results were unjust. (And they would be partially correct: the Court would have been just, but it would have been wrong; fixing the relationship between justice and rightness being the proper domain of the Legislature.)
However, by acting on a results-focused, rather than principled or jurisprudential approach, the Court gave society a number of real rights -- things that average, everyday people count on, like the ability to get contraception or an abortion without consulting a judge -- but rested them on shaky, unstable foundations.
Now, all that needs to happen for these real-world abilities to disappear, is for the jurisprudential foundation to be undermined. And now, there is little chance of a national "Right to Privacy" being passed, as there might have been if Roe or Griswold had been decided differently and there had been a public outcry of 'injustice.' It might have taken longer to get the results that people wanted, but the ultimate right would have been more secure as a result, if it had come in the form of a law or Constitutional Amendment instead of a Court opinion.
Results-focused or social-utility "jurisprudence" is almost always a cop-out, a trading of short-term gains for long-term instability and unintended consequences. That we have begun to rely on them more and more is either a sign that the Legislative branch of government is not doing its job and forcing the Judicial to step in, or that the Judicial branch is overstepping. (Which one you think it is, is infinitely debatable.)
Re:Wouldn't it be funny if (Score:3, Insightful)
Making your population afraid is old-school, and pretty much died with the Cold War. Making your population apathetic, otoh, is what all New Totalitarianism is all about.