Kind of a long one...
Oct. 21st, 2003 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usernamenumberI came across an article recently:
http://bowlingfortruth.com/moore/online/patriotact.htm
As you can probably guess from the url, it's from a site who's primary reason for existance is to discredit everything Michael Moore ever said. I've learned a lot from reading sites like that, as well as Michael Moore's own responses. The results have, I think, been good for me. I've always enjoyed Moore's work and I certainly don't buy every argument made on those sites, but it's useful to have a ready-made resource for the counterpoint to any given point in the interest of forming a more informed opinion.
Conservative sites like this and books like Al Franken's latest, which I really enjoyed, have led me to a conclusion that I'd given lip service to before, but never really taken to heart: Second-hand opinions are worse than none at all, be they from Bill O'Reilley, Michael Moore or whoever else. I always appreciated footnotes in rants before, but I never demanded them like I do now. I feel like this is something I should have realized years ago but it never clicked. So anyway, I read the article linked to above and that led to a series of events and reflections which have ultimately left me feeling very upset.
The webmaster introduces the piece sounding very sincere: "I too was concerned with the Patriot act until I found out the truth and actually read the actual facts & I felt stupid. I hate feeling stupid". The introduction ends with a link to the text of the Patriot Act and an encouragement to go read it. This was followed by a side-by-side comparison of two positions on the act entitled "Michael Moore vs. The Truth". Speaking on behalf of "The Truth" was an editor for that bastion of impartialness, The National Review, who's wife is a policy advisor and chief speechwriter for Dan Ashcroft[1].
Ummm...
Anyway, I didn't realize just what kind of a publication the National Review was or who "The Truth" was married to until after I'd read both sides of the "debate" and then done something I'm ashamed to say I have previously not been in the habbit of doing. Instead of picking which idealogue I identified with the most and rationalizing why that one must be right, I actually went and read the source material. Fortunately, both Moore and "The Truth" had singled out a couple of the more controversial sections so I didn't have to read the entire act just to get a sense for where they were coming from.
While I would like to say I fit somewhere between the extremes of Moore and "Truth", if I had to pick between Moore's "There's something very wrong with this" and "Truth"'s "There's nothing wrong with this" positions, I would without hesitation side with Moore. There is something wrong with the Patriot Act and this leads to what's got me so upset: First, I would never have actually read the act and reached these conclusions if it hadn't been for that article. But the people who wrote the article and so willingly linked to it were promoting a view very different from the one I came away with.
I don't get it.
The innocent in me wants it to just be a difference of opinions, but the defenses they make of the act, like saying that requests for records require a court order as though that means something, are contradicted by the actual text of the act, which makes it very clear that having met two minimal requirements, the judge _must_ provide an order for whatever the FBI wants. The cynic wants to say they were just trying to sound sincere and hoping that noone actually reads the material but, well, I'm just not that cynical. So maybe I'm wrong. But the conclusions that I reached in reading the act are backed up by many other critical pieces written by actual scholars of law. So what are they getting at? What are they thinking? Why do they believe what they believe? Idunno.
Anyway, I emailed my take on the text to both the webmaster of the site and "The Truth" himself (aka, Jonah Goldberg, if any of you were dying from the suspense). That was Friday, 10/17/03 and I haven't gotten a response yet.
I'm going to archive what I wrote here and, if anybody's actually read this far, solicit comments from anyone who feels they have soemthing to add:
-------------
Dear Sirs,
I'm willing to give Mr. Goldberg the benefit of the doubt with regard to his sincerity, but I believe he's misread the text of the USA PATRIOT act, specifically section 215, which he goes out of his way to defend. I, like Mr. Goldberg, am not a lawyer, but here is my response:
Goldberg:
First, "third parties" is vague enough to include libraries and other "secular holy sites", which Goldberg claims there is no reason to believe are implicated in the act. In fact, the USA PATRIOT act doesn't even get as specific as saying "third parties". It doesn't stipulate at all from whom the FBI can and cannot obtain items, only that items so requested must be "tangible things" (215/a/1).
Second, such requests do not require "approval" of a judge except in a relatively trivial sense. If the FBI asserts that the items being requested are pertinent to an ongoing investigation and the judge agrees that said investigation is not being "conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States", then the judge must approve it (sec 215/c/1). Note that the judge does not get to judge the relevance of the material being requested or in any other way decide whether or not the FBI's request is reasonable. The only criteria is that there exists an ongoing investigation not based soley upon protected activities (215/a/2) and that the FBI says the "tangible things" being requested are relevant to that investigation (215/b/2).
Now, I'll grant that the "not soley upon..." clause, at first glance, gives some relief. But consider this example: Suppose that the FBI recieves inteligence regarding a terrorist threat near our hometown and has some evidence implicating a particular citizen in the plot. Section 215 is worded vaguely enough that, since the judge does not actually get to judge the relevance of the FBI's request to their investigation, there is no reason the FBI could not then request and recieve _all_ records from, say, the local library-- including yours, mine and anyone else's simply by virtue of claiming (but not demonstrating) that the items are relevant to an investigation. The fact that neither you nor I have ever engaged in any non-protected actions doesn't even enter into the equasion. There is also no stipulation that I could find with regard to how the information so obtained may or may not be used.
So the "not soley upon" clause, section 215's apparent failsafe, does not provide nearly as much protection as it sounds like but Mr. Goldberg calls the section as a whole "relatively innocuous".
I agree that there are a number of alarmists out there who exhaggerate how problematic the USA PATRIOT act can be, but I am likewise bothered by conservatives who are overly appologetic for this broadly worded, extremely vague but extremely powerful piece of legislation. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to believe that laws should be written in a way that precludes the possibility of abuse. The details of the USA PATRIOT act in too many places lend themselves too easily abuse. And as for the point about section 215 not having been used yet-- I am willing to bet that just about anyone reading this can think of some person who is or has been voted into power that they would not trust with the ability to gather what has traditionally been protected, personal information under the pretext of an official investigation. Just because the gun hasn't been fired doesn't mean you oughtn't take it away.
--------------------
[1] = I found this out upon visiting The National Review's website an looking up his bio: http://www.nationalreview.com/masthead/masthead-goldberg.asp -- You'd think someone interested in Truth and not just supporting their own agenda would have at least acknowleged that teensy little possible conflict-of-interest before introducing a man as someone who simply "wants you to know the truth". I guess that's the part that offends me the most. I really want to believe that these people are just interested in telling the truth as they see it, but to leave out something like that... well, it's exactly the kind of thing they accuse Michael Moore of all the time.
http://bowlingfortruth.com/moore/online/patriotact.htm
As you can probably guess from the url, it's from a site who's primary reason for existance is to discredit everything Michael Moore ever said. I've learned a lot from reading sites like that, as well as Michael Moore's own responses. The results have, I think, been good for me. I've always enjoyed Moore's work and I certainly don't buy every argument made on those sites, but it's useful to have a ready-made resource for the counterpoint to any given point in the interest of forming a more informed opinion.
Conservative sites like this and books like Al Franken's latest, which I really enjoyed, have led me to a conclusion that I'd given lip service to before, but never really taken to heart: Second-hand opinions are worse than none at all, be they from Bill O'Reilley, Michael Moore or whoever else. I always appreciated footnotes in rants before, but I never demanded them like I do now. I feel like this is something I should have realized years ago but it never clicked. So anyway, I read the article linked to above and that led to a series of events and reflections which have ultimately left me feeling very upset.
The webmaster introduces the piece sounding very sincere: "I too was concerned with the Patriot act until I found out the truth and actually read the actual facts & I felt stupid. I hate feeling stupid". The introduction ends with a link to the text of the Patriot Act and an encouragement to go read it. This was followed by a side-by-side comparison of two positions on the act entitled "Michael Moore vs. The Truth". Speaking on behalf of "The Truth" was an editor for that bastion of impartialness, The National Review, who's wife is a policy advisor and chief speechwriter for Dan Ashcroft[1].
Ummm...
Anyway, I didn't realize just what kind of a publication the National Review was or who "The Truth" was married to until after I'd read both sides of the "debate" and then done something I'm ashamed to say I have previously not been in the habbit of doing. Instead of picking which idealogue I identified with the most and rationalizing why that one must be right, I actually went and read the source material. Fortunately, both Moore and "The Truth" had singled out a couple of the more controversial sections so I didn't have to read the entire act just to get a sense for where they were coming from.
While I would like to say I fit somewhere between the extremes of Moore and "Truth", if I had to pick between Moore's "There's something very wrong with this" and "Truth"'s "There's nothing wrong with this" positions, I would without hesitation side with Moore. There is something wrong with the Patriot Act and this leads to what's got me so upset: First, I would never have actually read the act and reached these conclusions if it hadn't been for that article. But the people who wrote the article and so willingly linked to it were promoting a view very different from the one I came away with.
I don't get it.
The innocent in me wants it to just be a difference of opinions, but the defenses they make of the act, like saying that requests for records require a court order as though that means something, are contradicted by the actual text of the act, which makes it very clear that having met two minimal requirements, the judge _must_ provide an order for whatever the FBI wants. The cynic wants to say they were just trying to sound sincere and hoping that noone actually reads the material but, well, I'm just not that cynical. So maybe I'm wrong. But the conclusions that I reached in reading the act are backed up by many other critical pieces written by actual scholars of law. So what are they getting at? What are they thinking? Why do they believe what they believe? Idunno.
Anyway, I emailed my take on the text to both the webmaster of the site and "The Truth" himself (aka, Jonah Goldberg, if any of you were dying from the suspense). That was Friday, 10/17/03 and I haven't gotten a response yet.
I'm going to archive what I wrote here and, if anybody's actually read this far, solicit comments from anyone who feels they have soemthing to add:
-------------
Dear Sirs,
I'm willing to give Mr. Goldberg the benefit of the doubt with regard to his sincerity, but I believe he's misread the text of the USA PATRIOT act, specifically section 215, which he goes out of his way to defend. I, like Mr. Goldberg, am not a lawyer, but here is my response:
Goldberg:
"It's a relatively innocuous provision of the Patriot Act that allows law enforcement to obtain, after getting approval from a judge, documents from third parties - your credit card company, for example - if they're pertinent to a terrorism investigation."
First, "third parties" is vague enough to include libraries and other "secular holy sites", which Goldberg claims there is no reason to believe are implicated in the act. In fact, the USA PATRIOT act doesn't even get as specific as saying "third parties". It doesn't stipulate at all from whom the FBI can and cannot obtain items, only that items so requested must be "tangible things" (215/a/1).
Second, such requests do not require "approval" of a judge except in a relatively trivial sense. If the FBI asserts that the items being requested are pertinent to an ongoing investigation and the judge agrees that said investigation is not being "conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States", then the judge must approve it (sec 215/c/1). Note that the judge does not get to judge the relevance of the material being requested or in any other way decide whether or not the FBI's request is reasonable. The only criteria is that there exists an ongoing investigation not based soley upon protected activities (215/a/2) and that the FBI says the "tangible things" being requested are relevant to that investigation (215/b/2).
Now, I'll grant that the "not soley upon..." clause, at first glance, gives some relief. But consider this example: Suppose that the FBI recieves inteligence regarding a terrorist threat near our hometown and has some evidence implicating a particular citizen in the plot. Section 215 is worded vaguely enough that, since the judge does not actually get to judge the relevance of the FBI's request to their investigation, there is no reason the FBI could not then request and recieve _all_ records from, say, the local library-- including yours, mine and anyone else's simply by virtue of claiming (but not demonstrating) that the items are relevant to an investigation. The fact that neither you nor I have ever engaged in any non-protected actions doesn't even enter into the equasion. There is also no stipulation that I could find with regard to how the information so obtained may or may not be used.
So the "not soley upon" clause, section 215's apparent failsafe, does not provide nearly as much protection as it sounds like but Mr. Goldberg calls the section as a whole "relatively innocuous".
I agree that there are a number of alarmists out there who exhaggerate how problematic the USA PATRIOT act can be, but I am likewise bothered by conservatives who are overly appologetic for this broadly worded, extremely vague but extremely powerful piece of legislation. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to believe that laws should be written in a way that precludes the possibility of abuse. The details of the USA PATRIOT act in too many places lend themselves too easily abuse. And as for the point about section 215 not having been used yet-- I am willing to bet that just about anyone reading this can think of some person who is or has been voted into power that they would not trust with the ability to gather what has traditionally been protected, personal information under the pretext of an official investigation. Just because the gun hasn't been fired doesn't mean you oughtn't take it away.
--------------------
[1] = I found this out upon visiting The National Review's website an looking up his bio: http://www.nationalreview.com/masthead/masthead-goldberg.asp -- You'd think someone interested in Truth and not just supporting their own agenda would have at least acknowleged that teensy little possible conflict-of-interest before introducing a man as someone who simply "wants you to know the truth". I guess that's the part that offends me the most. I really want to believe that these people are just interested in telling the truth as they see it, but to leave out something like that... well, it's exactly the kind of thing they accuse Michael Moore of all the time.
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Date: 2003-10-21 08:07 pm (UTC)