Do the Un-Safety Dance to the New World Disorder
With the Republicans now controlling both the House
and the Senate there is a new terrorist threat targeting the safety of American
civil liberties in cyberspace. This threat doesn’t come from some radical
religious wing seeking to hijack some jet airliners with nothing more than box
cutters and shoes with a fuse, nor does it come from some oil rich country halfway
around the world that is ruled by some elusive egomaniac. Instead, it comes
from our own homegrown executive cowboy and his Republican-controlled legislative
branch.
President George W. Bush has taken it upon himself to limit
the freedom of online communication and activity. The first blow was when Bush
signed the USA Patriot Act into law on Oct. 26, 2001. Put together in response
to the events of September 11, this bill was rushed through regular Congressional
procedure so that it could become law as quickly as possible. Not only were
procedures swept aside for the bill, but the bill swept aside various civil
liberties. Overall, this law invaded our right of privacy in the use of email
and web surfing.
New powers were given to both domestic and international law
enforcement agencies, leaving in place few if any checks and balances. The USA
Patriot Act allows for expanded tools of surveillance. Wiretaps can now be issued
for electronic communications. Not only are search warrants not required to
name the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to be searched, but a search warrant
obtained from a local district can be used to obtain information from any location
in a nationwide ISP. People who are being wiretapped don’t have to be
notified even after a “reasonable period” of time has passed in
which no wrongdoing has been found. ISP records pertaining to email content
and customer records can be retrieved without a court order, including credit
card numbers, as long as it is an “emergency” and there is reason
to believe there is an immediate danger of death or serious physical injury.
This last section of the Patriot Act, the part about the “immediate
danger of death or serious physical injury,” is being amended in a bill
that recently was made law, the Homeland Security Act (HSA). Under the HSA,
even more freedom is handed to the government. Essentially, not just law enforcement
agencies will be able to retrieve records from your ISP in “good faith”
— without a reasonable belief of a terrorist threat. Also, under the new
law there is no requirement that there be an “immediate” danger
of death or injury.
If all of this isn’t bad enough, the U.S. Department
of Education is also giving away all of our information to anyone who asks.
So read the fine print on your student loan documents.
Basically, we as American citizens can’t breathe
wrong without having Big Brother looking over our shoulder. As far as I can
tell, our civil liberties weren’t the problem in the first place. Most
of the new provisions in the USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act are aimed
at non-violent, domestic computer crime, not international terrorism. I don’t
see our civil liberties ever getting in the way of the government doing their
job of fighting terrorism. But I can see the lack of civil liberties combined
with growing fear allowing our government to increasingly take over our lives
and rush in a new world disorder.
