The perils of the Patriot Act
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June 12, 2013 |
WASHINGTON, DC - Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID), a
member of the House Judiciary Committee, called
for Congressional reexamination of the USA
Patriot Act in a House floor speech and an op-ed
published in The Hill today. In the wake of
revelations that the National Security Agency
has been collecting the telephone records of
tens of millions of Americans, Rep. Labrador
declared that “it is time for Congress to
reexamine all sections of the USA Patriot Act”
and that we must “reduce the scope of government
power before it becomes so large and so
impenetrable that regaining our freedoms becomes
almost impossible.”
To watch the Congressman’s floor speech,
click here.
By Rep. Raul Labrador
During the past week, we’ve heard about a series
of major violations of our civil liberties,
including the extremely alarming news that the
National Security (NSA) is collecting the
telephone records of tens of millions of
American customers of Verizon.
This wholesale snooping on innocent Americans is
an unacceptable violation of one of our most
basic freedoms, the right to privacy and to be
free from government surveillance, and one of
many unintended but predictable consequences of
the USA Patriot Act.
I proudly voted against reauthorizing the
Patriot Act three times because of its potential
for abuse, and more people are starting to see
that abuse.
Even former Vice President Al Gore — not someone
I normally agree with — had the right response
to the NSA report, tweeting “In digital era,
privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is
secret blanket surveillance obscenely
outrageous?”
It’s not just you, Al. I agree!
Of course, what’s happening with the NSA is just
the latest example of the government abusing its
power. We’ve all heard about the Internal
Revenue Service scandal, in which one of the
most powerful agencies in the government
deliberately targeted conservative organizations
for audits and other forms of harassment. We’ve
all heard about what happened with Fox News
reporter James Rosen, whose phone was tapped by
the Justice Department even though Attorney
General Eric Holder testified before the House
Judiciary Committee “that potential prosecution
of the press for the disclosure of material,
that is not something that I have ever been
involved in, heard of, or would think would be a
wise policy.”
Needless to say, what Holder said under oath is
sharply at odds with what happened to Rosen, and
I’ve joined with my Judiciary Committee
colleagues in sending a letter to the attorney
general requesting that he appear before the
committee again to explain these discrepancies.
Then, just this past Friday, The Washington Post
reported that the NSA and the FBI are tapping
directly into the central servers of nine
leading U.S. Internet services, including
Google, Facebook and YouTube, extracting audio
and video chats, photographs, emails, documents
and connection logs. Who knows what we’ll learn
next!
When thinking about all of these scandals, I’m
reminded of what James Madison wrote in
Federalist Paper No. 51 in the early days of our
country:
“If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither
external nor internal controls on government
would be necessary. In framing a government
which is to be administered by men over men, the
great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control
itself.”
In recent years, many members of both parties
have forgotten Madison’s lesson — a lesson that
infuses our founding document, the U.S.
Constitution — that government powers must be
limited because governments, by their very
nature, have a hard time “controlling”
themselves.
During the Bush years, many Republicans ignored
that truth, and in the Obama era, many Democrats
have ignored it too. What’s happening with the
NSA, the IRS, the DOJ and other agencies should
correct the misguided idea that it’s OK to give
the government more powers so long as the
“right” party is in power — because parties
change. And, to quote Madison again,
“enlightened statesmen will not always be at the
helm.”
For all of these reasons and more, I voted
against the USA Patriot Act, which despite its
nice name was written in such a sweeping way
that it opened the door for the NSA to invade
the privacy of millions of Americans. That is
because the USA Patriot Act’s Section 215 allows
the FBI to seek the production of “tangible
things” to obtain foreign intelligence and to
protect against clandestine intelligence
activities.
But because the statute does not require that
either the caller or recipient of the call be a
foreign agent or located abroad, you can see how
the FBI could be tempted to collect broad swaths
of data concerning Americans’ telephone calls to
detect patterns of activity, as many analysts
suggest may have happened in this case.
That is why on June 6, I joined several of my
House colleagues in sending a letter to FBI
Director Robert Mueller and NSA Director Gen.
Keith Alexander requesting more information
concerning their agencies’ data collection
activities.
Given public outrage about the NSA’s abuse of
power, it is time for Congress to reexamine all
sections of the USA Patriot Act, and I am
leading my House colleagues in starting that
reexamination. Now is the time to work together
to reduce the scope of government power before
it becomes so large and so impenetrable that
regaining our freedoms becomes almost
impossible. Now is our moment, and we must seize
it.
Labrador, who has represented Idaho’s 1st
district since 2011, serves on the House
Judiciary Committee and the House Natural
Resources Committee. |
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