Since its inception, one of the few points that could be argued in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act is its use against potential terror plots. The argument being that intelligence agencies would catch any plans and foil them, and that they had no interest in Americans who were not directly involved in these plots.
The National Security Agency would gather information and then pass it along to the relevant agency. The information of any innocent or bystander Americans hidden when it could be done so. Now, the New York Times reports, that, according to a new set of regulations, the information gathered could be much more easily accessed directly by other governmental agencies, without any sort of privacy safeguards applied.
Despite the USA PATRIOT Act being drafted for defense against terrorism, the powers it grants to the NSA have been used for issues outside of terrorism.
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, as long as the good guys are catching the bad guys, but it brings up an important issue. These powers were drafted in order to be used in extraordinary circumstances, to give an agency the ability to supersede an individual’s rights in the interest of national security.
But there are no safeguards established to stop an agency for using it for any reason other than that.
For example, one of the powers granted is a section that allows law enforcement to conduct a search without alerting the suspect for up to thirty days. Again, the argument can be made that it’s a vital tool in the fight against terrorism, and perhaps it is.
However the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that in 2013 approximately 11,129 requests were made, but only 51 were for terrorism related cases. A whopping 9,401 were for narcotic cases alone. Important for law enforcement to close, but important enough to utilize the power of the PATRIOT Act, and in vastly larger quantities than for what the power was intended to be used for?
It’s clear that governmental agencies aren’t just using the powers granted by the Act for terrorist cases as was the original intention. Now they won’t even need to request for information from the NSA. Instead they’ll be free to peruse the agency’s trove of data at will. According to the Massachusetts ACLU’s blog on privacy:
“FBI agents won’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They could simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations.
“And if they find something that suggests, say, involvement in illegal drug activity, they could send that information to local or state police. That means information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called “national security” will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes.”
Yes, you could argue that people being arrested with this new information would be violating laws anyway, but where does this end?
The USA PATRIOT Act’s original intention was solely for national security and terrorism related crimes only. Then it spread to narcotics. What is next? Victimless crimes? Then protests? Without safeguards or firmly defined borders, it looks like the powers granted by the PATRIOT Act will continue to expand.
Featured image via EFF-Graphics, available under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
