The Patriot Act: overview and impact

Patriot Act - Speech for a TV Show

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for inviting me to be on the show; I appreciate the opportunity to inform your viewers more thoroughly about the controversy surrounding the Patriot Act.

The attacks of September 11 changed the way that our nation looks at security and especially the way that we look at privacy and individual rights. Our nation was attacked by individuals acting out of a deep hate for our way of life. These individuals all shared ethnicity and religious beliefs; their fellow terrorists also are predominantly of Arab descent and believers in Islam. Our lawmakers have responded by tightening restrictions in a variety of areas, from immigration regulations to airport screening to investigating American citizens' behavior more closely. Some of these measures have been criticized for encouraging profiling, the discrimination of a certain group without other evidence of criminal behavior.

I want to tell you that these allegations are untrue, that profiling has been used as a method of police investigation for years, and that our civil liberties are threatened by terrorists who wish to harm Americans, not by legislation that exists to protect us and allow our law enforcement officials to perform their job duties (investigation, interrogation, and the like). These new security measures are bestowed on the government by the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, which is referred to by its acronym, the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act (Department of Justice website 2001).

This legislation has been widely criticized for the powers that it gives to intelligence agencies and government monitors, from military intelligence groups to individual police officers. One widely-cited passage even gives the government the power to access in individual's library records (Lithwick and Turner 2003).

These provisions do exist; that fact is inarguable. However, the library records provision exists to provide the government a way of gathering intelligence about individuals who are suspected terrorists without revealing they are being monitored, not to monitor the average American citizen's library card. The library provision and the debate over it is only one example of the fear that has been inspired by parts of the Patriot Act-civil libertarians are also in arms about other Patriot Act measures, like warrantless searches and possible restrictions on the press (Lithwick and Turner 2003).

These concerns are valid; civil liberties like the right to privacy and individual liberty are the values on which our country was based. The protections against government intrusion on a citizen's personal life are not only a significant part of the American way of life, but they are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Limits on the surveillance and interrogative methods used by police are areas that many critics are saying can be violated by some provisions of the Patriot Act. The powers given to federal investigators regarding free speech, freedom of the press, and the human rights of detainees have all been cited as being potentially in violation of constitutionally protected rights (Wikipedia 2005). However, it should be noted that these practices help catch and convict terrorists (or individuals who intend to carry out terrorist acts), who are criminals. Criminals, by virtue of breaking the law, give up some of their civil liberties (a right to privacy, for example) and established procedure regarding police behavior (or that of other investigators, like the military) already protects the civil liberties of the accused who have not been convicted. The Patriot Act is mainly an extension of these traditionally accepted police procedures to make them more useful in our nation's war on terror and the apprehension of terrorists.

Where are we to draw the line between these civil liberties that we hold so dear as a nation and the need to protect our nation against the insidious threat of terrorism, which can be perpetrated by one motivated individual? Logically, it makes sense to examine more closely the lives of individuals who fit a set profile of known terrorists, much in the manner that investigators can profile rapists or serial killers; if prior cases involved a white male in his twenties, no one will scream profiling when the police more closely investigate young white males. However, cases about terrorism where police investigate individuals who are fundamentalist Muslims, the religious group known to have produced the September 11 terrorists, are an almost immediate cry of "racial and religious profiling." Claims of racial profiling are complaints against what is an established police investigation method and are a last resort by accused individuals to divert attention away from their crimes and toward a more favorable outcome.

Situations of blatant racial discrimination (requiring Arab males to take a loyalty oath to the U.S., for example) or of invasions into private, law-abiding citizens' lives (pulling their library records), while contradictory to our ideals of individual rights, are really not likely to happen. The priority of the federal government is currently and will remain, naturally, in pursuing terrorist suspects whom they already have reasonable suspicions about as opposed to investigating and intruding into the private lives of law-abiding citizens.

A came to this panel with the intent of being a voice of moderation; I do intend to offer viewers an option between the violation of the civil liberties that they hold so dear and extending these rights and privileges to individuals whose intent is to harm the U.S.

There does exist a middle ground of protecting both the safety and liberties of American citizens; a way to ensure that all suspects are treated in a manner that is consistent with our traditional values of equal treatment and privacy while still maintaining national security and not unduly hampering the efforts of law enforcement officials.