More of the same

I've been reading the news about President Obama's plans for fighting terrorism and terrorists, and lo and behold, after all the rhetoric in the campaign against former President Bush's policies, he's pretty much following those policies. He found himself in the middle of reality and faced with using existing tools, tweaked to look more humane, or develop new ones.

And he found the current political and legal toolbox nice, with all of its neat torture tools, Geneva Convention aside or wrapped around them, the invasion of privacy rules, only for suspected terrorists of course, loss of legal rights, again only for terrorists, and security rules, to hide any violations and protect violaters. Yup, it's quite a set of tools.

And so President Obama wants the Patriot Act renewed, and only Congress is hedging the rules in the law to provide more rights and protections for citizens. They're doing this because every audit to date on the Patriot Act has shown the FBI never worked within it, and always violated it. And they've shown that 95% of the search warrants under the Act weren't for suspected terrorists, but ordinary crimes.

The FBI has been using the Patriot Act in place of other existing legal avenues to investigate suspects because it removes the safeguards, like a judge's review and signature, from their work. They short cutted the system for no real reasons except being too lazy to prove their case to a judge and give the suspect, many times just ancillary people or innocent citizens, rights. And they've failed to followup warrants with the evidence in the timeframe to a judge.

Cheating to fight crime is one thing, widespread and wholesale cheating to fight crime but including innocent people, especially citizens, is far and away another thing. And it's why the Patriot Act doesn't need to be renewed or even extended. It's just needs to be stopped and make the FBI do the work they're supposed, under the law with all the rights and protections afforded suspects.

And if Congress wants to renew the Patriot Act, they should really pare it down and put in a lot of rights, protections and especially oversight. It's time the pendulum swung back in favor of citizens. We don't need stories about what happened when the FBI used minimal and often unreliable or noncredible information or evidence, and sometimes just creating it, to arrest and detain citizens to later, often months to years, without any charges and having to rebuild their life and career now destroyed.

Anyway, the discussions are just starting, so I'm early, but I want to express my view as I did when the Patriot Act was first proposed and then renewed. It's not necessary and hasn't proven sufficiently successful for the lost of privacy, rights and protections. We as citizens aren't the enemy and shouldn't be treated like we are. That's what the FBI needs to learn and remember.