15 June 2005
Small victory
The law-makers in Washington evidently haven't completely lost their hearing. In apparent response to public outcry, they voted 238-187 today to block the Justice Department and the FBI from using the Patriot Act to spy on people's library records and bookstore sales slips. (A number of libraries had been getting rid of patrons' records so they wouldn't be available if sought under the law.) Of course, if the people in Washington had any sense, they'd simply scrap the so-called Patriot Act altogether. We don't pay our government to spy on us.
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2 comments:
I don't know about scrapping it altogether. I think they are right to take this out of it though. Hopefully if Congress doesn't remove the sneak and peak provision, a federal court will.
Whenever we think of these provisions, in addition to thinking of cases in which they work to stop a crime, we have to consider cases in which the extra authority allows someone to abuse their power and commit a crime. There is, I think, tremendous danger when it comes to intelligence since the intel-gathering process isn't visible to the public.
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