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Patriot Act's Big Brother
by David Cole
The Nation March 17, 2003
In early February, the Center for Public Integrity disclosed a leaked draft of the Bush Administration's next round in the war on terrorism--the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA). The draft legislation, stamped Confidential and dated January 9, 2003, appears to be in final form but has not yet been introduced in Congress. Presumably the Administration had determined that the timing would be more propitious for passage--meaning less propitious for reasoned debate--after we go to war with Iraq. But it is one thing to play politics with the timing of a farm bill; it is another matter to do so with a bill that would radically alter our rights and freedoms.
If the Patriot Act was so named to imply that those who question its sweeping new powers of surveillance, detention and prosecution are traitors, the DSEA takes that theme one giant step further. It provides that any citizen, even native-born, who supports even the lawful activities of an organization the executive branch deems "terrorist" is presumptively stripped of his or her citizenship. To date, the "war on terrorism" has largely been directed at non-citizens, especially Arabs and Muslims. But the DSEA would actually turn citizens associated with "terrorist" groups into aliens.
Other provisions are designed to further insulate the war on terrorism from public and judicial scrutiny. The bill would authorize secret arrests, a practice common in totalitarian regimes but never before authorized in the United States. It would terminate court orders barring illegal police spying entered before September 11, 2001, without regard to the need for judicial supervision. It would allow secret government wiretaps and searches without even a warrant from the super secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when Congress has authorized the use of force.
And it would give the government the same access to credit reports as private companies, without judicial supervision. Historically, we have imposed a higher threshold, and judicial oversight, on government access to such private information, because government has the motive and the wherewithal to abuse the information in ways private companies generally do not.
But the trajectory of the war on terrorism is probably best illustrated by an obscure provision that would eliminate the distinction between domestic terrorism and international terrorism for a host of investigatory purposes.
The DSEA's treatment of expatriation and domestic terrorism are harbingers of things to come. Thus far, much of the war on terrorism has been targeted at foreign nationals and sold to the American people on that ground. Americans' rights are not at stake, the argument goes, because we're concerned with "international" crime committed mostly by "aliens." With the DSEA, however, the Administration seeks to transgress both the alien-citizen line, by turning citizens into aliens for their political ties, and the domestic-international line, extending to wholly domestic criminal-law-enforcement tools that were previously reserved for international terrorism investigations.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030317&s=cole
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