Repeal The Patriot Act And Stop Spying On U.S. Citizens

(The cartoon image above is by Nate Beeler in The Columbus Dispatch.)

"Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. . .

Governmental officials -- including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law --have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.

The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them."

Those words could be describing the massive government spying on its own citizens that the U.S. government is doing today, but they're actually from a report by the Church Committee in 1976 (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). The idea of the U.S. government illegally and unconstitutionally spying on American citizens is not new. The government has been doing that for decades now. The COINTELPRO program by the FBI back in the 60's and early 70's gathered information on over a million citizens -- and it was just one of many spying programs the government was engaging in.

But as egregious and unconstitutional as these programs were, they look like a drop in the bucket when compared to the massive spying on U.S. citizens that is currently happening. The federal intelligence and policing agencies saw a golden opportunity after the 9/11 tragedy in 2001, and they used that tragedy to con Congress and the American people into thinking more spying was needed to protect this country from "terrorism". Congress responded by passing the Patriot Act and the public accepted it -- both out of fear, and without realizing the awesome and unconstitutional power they were granting the government.

The government promised that they would not use these new powers to spy on American citizens, but just to gather information on foreign nationals who posed a danger to the United States. They lied. No government power ever goes unused, and they had been given the power to spy on (gather data on) hundreds of millions of people -- both citizens and non-citizens. And that's just what they did. They collected and stored data on untold millions of American citizens -- and they did it in secret and without getting a search warrant (as required by the Constitution). And most people were blissfully ignorant of this until it was exposed by Edward Snowden.

Now that the massive spying on citizens has been exposed, the government is trying to do a little public relations to repair their image. The president (and some members of Congress) recently revealed a plan to introduce legislation that would stop the government storage of this "meta-data", and would leave that storage to the various telecommunications companies (who supposedly could destroy it after some undetermined period of time). The idea is to convince American citizens that the massive spying is going to stop, but the truth is that the government will still have access (secretly) to all of the same information.

This proposed bill is akin to putting a band-aid on a bullet wound -- it might do a tiny bit of good, but it falls far short of fixing the problem and the patient (democracy) will probably still die. Much more needs to be done, and nothing less than a full repeal of the Patriot Act . Some will say that the law is needed to protect this country -- but you don't protect a democracy by turning it into a police state (where the government can spy on its citizens at will).