Since the attacks on September 11th, which felled the World Trade Towers and left a gaping hole in the edifice of the Pentagon, it has become almost cliche to observe that this assault effectively altered American life forever. Whether this is an accurate sentiment or merely a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is evident that this allegedly profound re-calibration of our lives is a product of the dichotomy created by the newly emergent threat to national security and the set of legislative responses thereto.
With regard to this latter category though, there remains still a great deal of debate as to whether the former category is being truly addressed or whether these new laws are in fact serving to effect changes that are separate from the conditions of our post-9/11 law-enforcement culture. By the time the smoke had begun to clear at Ground Zero, Congress had enacted the United States Patriot Act.
A bulky piece of legislation which was fast-tracked through both houses of our government without even an utterance of debate, its uncontested passage was highly contingent upon the circumstances of extreme political sensitivity and legislative uncertainty that accompanied the first month following the attacks. Its primary advocate, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, succeeded in championing the bill through Congress with little more than an hour’s testimony which did not include submission to open questioning. Lewis, 1) In an atmosphere that vociferously discouraged any indications of dissent, which Democratic congressmen especially viewed as the pathway to public crucifixion in such emotionally charged times, the Patriot Act came into force on October 24th, 2001.
The Patriot Act was set forth with the proposed mission to “deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes. (107th Congress, 1) Entered into the American psyche as a weapon against those forces which would threaten national security, the legislation has since been under intense scrutiny for the tenuous nature of its passage and for its invocation of the apparent contrast between the drive to strengthen security and the Constitutional centrality of individual freedoms. The Patriot Act awarded the United States government with a broad range of newfound powers which have been said, by advocates of its content, to diminish the restraints to law-enforcement that have made it so difficult for agencies to prevent the occurrence of domestic terrorism.
Of particular note to many private citizens of the United States has been the gradual breakdown of a set of protections to individual privacy. With government surveillance of domestic, subversive activities taking center-stage in the race to assign blame for the security shortcomings that allowed these attacks to occur, the Patriot Act is especially concerned with expanding the rights of intelligence agencies, local law enforcement and the federal government to acquire information from and about American citizens.
With new laws deconstructing the structural processes already in place to acquiring rights for the use of telephone wiretaps, the willful seizure of personal information and the investigation of individuals without probable cause, the United States government responded to the attacks on its people by directing its legislation at those who had already been victimized by terrorism.
Even beyond weakening protections to individual privacy, the legislation was crafted to incorporate a public sector forum as yet unaccounted for, extending “to the Internet the already broad authority to monitor transactional information about communications with very little justification. ” (CDT, 2) In this set of responses to the terrorist attacks, the federal government began a process wherein Constitutional liberties had become legislatively synonymous with a weak national security strategy.
Thus, advocates of the Patriot Act, a bill so named for indisputable reasons of image-shaping, have used its conditions to blur the line between terrorist investigation and criminal investigation and even lawful political dissent. In this last application, there is serious cause for alarm amongst defendants of the Constitution. The first amendment to the Bill of Rights is directly assailed by the legislation which, among its heretofore unthinkable entitlements, has given the government the right to review the medical records, emails, library records and other such distinctly private affects as they pertained to ‘suspected’ individuals. ACLU, 1) Essentially bypassing the ‘probable cause’ clause which keeps criminal investigation under the control of due process, the Patriot Act is visibly adaptable to all manner of civil activity which could not have traditionally been considered in any way associated with terrorism prior to September 11th. The result is a right to free speech, political resistance and peaceable assembly that is dramatically blunted.
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Such is to note that the Patriot Act is today most commonly implemented in investigations concerning immigration, drug trafficking and, most nefariously, political dissent. In the face of controversial War on Terror initiatives such as the conflict in Iraq, the protest and resistance movements have been stunted by laws and permit-denials that are appropriated by the Patriot Act’s emphasis on security. This likewise accounts for the pointed withdrawal from the Constitution’s fourth amendment.
Again, another locus at which probable cause has been removed from consideration, the hazy definition of activity which can be considered associated with terrorism can now be levied to forego the investigative processes of criminal law enforcement. In direct contrast with the spirit of the fourth amendment, “the Patriot Act broadened the government’s power to search an individual’s home without telling her until weeks or months later, and to do so in any criminal case. ” (CDT, 2) Among its many shortcomings is here one of the most troubling.
With the Patriot Act, the United States government has shown itself to be either unwilling or unable to separate terrorist activity from civil or criminal activity. The springs from the inherent flaw to the logical and practical underpinnings of the 2001 bill. Its twofold set of assumptions—that safety can only be preserved through the sacrifice of personal liberties and that terrorism is the product of bureaucratic obstacles to law-enforcement—both proceed from a faulty ideological seedling that far predates 9/11.
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In its forceful attainment of new authorities which have even further removed it from the province of democratic process, the United States government has implemented legislation that may usher in a new era of sustained McCarthyism. With the ‘terrorist’ tag supplanting the ‘communist’ label that was considered social, professional and political anathema in the 40’s and 50’s, the Patriot Act is the first and broadest of post-9/11 tools for the extension of ideological hegemony in an age of highly charged philosophical division.
Much like the witch-hunt that McCarthyism engendered, the Patriot Act’s impact on the Bill of Rights demonstrates a common flight of misdirection in our representative democracy. When 19 foreign nationals hijacked the four airliners that caused such carnage in September, 2001, the government responded with legislation that aimed its power squarely at the rights of its own citizens.
While there are countless cases emerging daily illustrating the government’s willingness to flex its muscle against political groups, religious organizations and private citizens at home, it has yet to prove that these measures are providing the nation with any greater security. And as this war continues unabated, it will remain to be seen whether this short-sighted surrender of our liberties will contribute in any way to the long-term posterity of freedom.
