Patriot Act doesn’t protect; it destroys

George Orwell should have been at the Constitutional convention
because, according to Garin Hovannisian in “Patriot Act
protects citizens” (Feb. 4), when our founding fathers
conceived a nation built upon the ideals of individual liberty and
free will, they were obviously thinking with his book
“1984” in mind. The USA Patriot Act, in
Hovannisian’s opinion, embodies this country’s spirit
of democracy and freedom.

I beg to differ.

Prying on the reading habits of Internet users and meddling in
the financial transactions of citizens with
“suspicious” last names doesn’t seem very
patriotic. Dissent, on the other hand, is.

This country seems to forget about the thin line that divides
freedom and total control during a national emergency. We seem to
gleefully compromise liberty in the name of superficial safety. And
more than two years after losing much of our liberty, some of us
still claim that this novel-sized document called the Patriot Act
is righteous and constitutional.

News flash: The act is a catalyst that is slowly easing American
citizens into a police state, completely overshadowing freedom and
justifying hard-line tactics under the banner of patriotism and
national security.

It was passed and signed into law with great haste; it is a
vague piece of legislation that gave John Ashcroft the green light
to solace a discomforted nation and, if need be, annihilate the
constitutional freedoms of innocent U.S. citizens.

In his article, Hovannisian discusses what the Patriot Act did
for this country, and I follow his logic. Indeed, the Patriot Act
“authorizes the use of new investigative techniques.”
It did that ““ and a whole lot more.

Grounded in the concept of “guilt by association”
““ whether it be ethnic, religious or ideological ““ the
Patriot Act consolidates an unbalanced share of vast new power
within the executive branch of our government. The act removes old
limits on the executive governing surveillance and intelligence
options and even opens a wide array of anti-terrorism tools that,
when utilized, weaken the civil liberties of citizens who are only
distantly or vaguely linked to terrorist activities.

Essentially, the act gave the U.S. government the ability to
excavate huge amounts of information from almost every sector of
private life ““ not only can they conduct sneak-and-peek
searches, but they can also track e-mail and Internet usage, obtain
sensitive personal records, monitor financial transactions and
conduct nationwide roving wiretaps that can tap into anyone’s
communication more easily than before.

Our constitutional rights are placed in jeopardy because this
act silences political dissent and widens the definition of
domestic terrorism.

The act also handed new tools to the Immigration and
Naturalization Services, now called the Bureau of Citizenship and
Immigration Services, and many Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants
have been detained for indefinite periods of time in discreet
locations, merely on the basis of suspicion. They are being held,
under the law, without representation or guarantees of due process
and remain uninformed of the crime of which they are accused.
Don’t you love the warm, fuzzy feeling of equality?

Hovannisian also stated, and I agree, that the act allowed for
sharing of information between criminal and intelligence
operations. This “sharing” opened a door to a
resurgence of domestic spying by the CIA.

So, in a nutshell, Hovannisian was accurate in his examination
of what the Patriot Act does, in fact, do. Where he missed the mark
was in his explication of how this is a tool that is in line with
the Constitution and statutory law. With the birth of the Patriot
Act, personal privacy met its legal doom. The act is a severe
assault on civil liberties and privacy rights.

President Bush has been preaching that terrorists had attacked
the United States because they despised our freedoms. Little did
the American public know, the biggest threat to this
country’s freedoms would be a law enacted by the government
that claims to protect them.

Hovannisian wrote, “Countless opponents of the Patriot Act
have cited Benjamin Franklin’s timeless quote, “˜They
that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ … In the choice
between liberty and safety, they have chosen terrorism.”

We didn’t choose terrorism, buddy, we chose democracy.

Uzma Kolsy is a second-year political science
student.