Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.
Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:51 pm
Time: 8:51 pm
Results for patriot act
4 results foundAuthor: Sanchez, Julian Title: Leashing the Surveillance State: How to Reform Patriot Act Surveillance Authorities Summary: Congress recently approved a temporary extension of three controversial surveillance provisions of the USA Patriot Act and successor legislation, which had previously been set to expire at the end of February. In the coming weeks, lawmakers have an opportunity to review the sweeping expansion of domestic counter-terror powers since 9/11 and, with the benefit of a decade’s perspective, strengthen crucial civil-liberties safeguards without unduly burdening legitimate intelligence gathering. Two of the provisions slated for sunset—roving wiretap authority and the socalled “Section 215” orders for the production of records — should be narrowed to mitigate the risk of overcollection of sensitive information about innocent Americans. A third—authority to employ the broad investigative powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against “lone wolf” suspects who lack ties to any foreign terror group — does not appear to be necessary at all. More urgent than any of these, however, is the need to review and substantially modify the statutes authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to secretly demand records, without any prior court approval, using National Security Letters. Though not slated to sunset with the other three Patriot provisions, NSLs were the focus of multiple proposed legislative reforms during the 2009 reauthorization debates, and are also addressed in at least one bill already introduced this year. Federal courts have already held parts of the current NSL statutes unconstitutional, and the government’s own internal audits have uncovered widespread, systematic misuse of expanded NSL powers. Congress should resist recent Justice Department pressure to further broaden the scope of NSL authority — and, indeed, should significantly curtail it. In light of this history of misuse, as well as the uncertain constitutional status of NSLs, a sunset should be imposed along with more robust reporting and oversight requirements. Details: Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2011. 32p. Source: Internet Resource: Policy Analysis No. 675: Accessed August 1, 2011 at: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA675.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA675.pdf Shelf Number: 122241 Keywords: Counter-TerrorismPatriot ActPrivacySurveillance (U.S.) |
Author: The NYU Review of Law and Security Title: Are We Safer? In New York City? In our states? In the country at large? Summary: Strolling down the street, sitting in traffic, listening to campaign slogans, one hears the question daily: “Are We Safer?” Whether we want to or not, we cannot help but bend our ear in the direction of the voice that promises an answer. Rarely is the answer firm or reassuring. Always, it seems these days to be partisan or driven by political concerns. “Yes, we are safer,” the Republicans tell us, except when they want to encourage fear as a basis of support for continuity in the White House or for the war in Iraq. “No,” the Democrats tell us, figuring the image of the Republicans as insufficient protectors cannot but help the Democrats in the coming election. Citizens line up accordingly. But the question of the nation’s safety is only partly a matter of conjecture; it is also a matter of fact. Since September 11, the country has taken numerous steps legislatively, judicially, militarily and in the Oval Office to ameliorate weaknesses in our security system. Some of these measures have proven effective, some have not. Policymakers continue to scrutinize the efficacy of our border control, our information gathering and other counterterrorism measures in the hopes of assessing these measures. But in the heated political atmosphere, the conclusions on both sides have become suspect. The relationship between safety and the legitimacy of authoritative analysis is not something to be overlooked. The respect for language is a sign of the authenticity of the relationship between citizen and state. It is, in that sense, fundamental to a functioning democracy. Education, as envisioned by Jefferson and the founding fathers, was first and foremost education of the citizen and at the heart of that education was the proper and learned use of language. In the context of American society, religious doctrine reinforces in theory the sanctity of impeccably used language. If language is an inviolable basis of the social (and personal) contract, it is also the first tool in the battle for power. As language goes, so goes politics. George Orwell insisted that there is a direct correlation between the integrity of politics and the honesty with which those in power use language. So, too, for the obverse. “Corrupt language leads to corrupt politics.” Consider, in this context, the use of language by President George W. Bush and his administration. On the one hand, we have the President who displays a disregard for the word so much so that it has become a trademark of sorts. “Nucular,” not nuclear, “subliminable” not subliminal, “embetter” not improve, “resignate,” instead of resonate. More, he relishes the colloquial, in his case, the slang of American Westerns. When it comes to Osama, his goal is to “Smoke ‘em out,” and when it comes to the insurgents in Iraq, he dares, “Bring ‘em on.” But while George Bush downplays language as something to respect and pay too much attention to, his administration is busy lobbing terms of great import at the American public. In the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, Bush’s circle of advisors has created a lexicon of terms aimed at persuading the American mind with the word itself. The terminology which labels the multiplicity of changes on behalf of national security and the war on terror are full of examples: Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and the Citizens Corps. Not to mention the use of value statements as strategic euphemisms designed to quell further thought, as if to say that he who first labels the situation, wins the battle of interpretation. Take, for example, the word ‘coalition,’ which in reality consists of U.S. troops with comparably negligible troops from England and a few small countries; or the statement that the U.S. is “bringing democracy and freedom” to the Middle East. This use of words as “euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” Orwell’s description of politically slanted speech, is a basic technique of language misconstrued for political ends: “liberation” instead of occupation, “military justice” instead of incommunicado detention, “unlawful combatant” instead of prisoner of war, “collateral damage” instead of civilian deaths, “enabling interrogation” instead of torture, and so on. American policymakers are eminently aware of the firepower of linguistic ammunition and of the importance of George W. Bush seeming like a confused, lost communicator. It is part of the process of spinning the nation. If Orwell were around, he might want, in the case of President Bush and his entourage, to add a new category for the current state of affairs: posing. How could someone as clueless and full of human foibles have an evil plan? He’s just a regular guy, with a regular guy’s language. What he says must be right. It’s just down-home, simple fact. Criticism of the government is treason, lack of support for the President is a lack of support for the troops, spending American lives and money abroad at the rate of 20 million dollars a day is patriotism and love of country. Yet in contradistinction to the signs of verbal laxity on the part of Bush, the careful selection of words, coordinated at the executive level, to launch the war in Iraq and by extension the war on terror at home, has been a strong and unflagging tactic of the Bush Administration as they have tackled the Axis of Evil and the possibility of unknown terrorists among us. They understand, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote that the misuse of facts, the use of “deliberate falsehood,” is “clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action.” Powell’s insistence before the U.N. that there was “evidence, not conjecture” of WMD’s in Iraq, and that his facts were “true” and “well-documented” has turned into the admission that there did not seem to be weapons of mass destruction. The public denial of any knowledge of torture practices and the subsequent release of documents sanctioning torture would be another case of the use of misinformation as action. The duplicity was intensified by the attack on those who questioned the initial assertions of the government. Rumsfeld, members of Congress and others attacked the media for “hurting our chances,” by “dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded,” rather than the signs of progress. And what of the Democrats? It seems they have lost their dictionaries and have ceded to the Republicans the role of wordsmiths, as if one of the perks of power is the right to control language. One can only assume either that they agree with the Republicans on some level, or that they are scared. The Republicans, they know, will label their words propagandistic and they want to avoid that, it seems, at all costs. But what about taking an oath to use language simply as it is used in the dictionary? Killing is killing, whether it is by a terrorist or an American soldier. From that, they could graduate to facts. The numbers of dollars spent and Americans killed is not an abstraction; it is not a matter of debate. It is a fact. As is the relationship between the Saudis and the Bush family, whether harmful or benign. And so on. The press has not always been helpful. They have helped spread the factual errors of the Bush Administration by refusing to fact-check, as if unwilling to put themselves in the position of pointing to errors of fact. There was no yellow cake uranium sent to Niger. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was little to no chance that the oil in Iraq would be able to be sold on the market until after a complete rehaul costing vast sums of time and money reengineered them for producing crude oil. The fact is that Democrats and Republicans alike have ceded to the Bush Administration’s unspoken conviction that all words, all use of facts are ideology. In this, there is tremendous victory. No words are valuable; no facts, it seems, are without spin. Everything, it is agreed, is opinion. How do we find a language of honesty? Vaclav Havel had some advice. The first premise is to look at the facts. The U.S. invaded Iraq, for example. For what reasons it did so is interpretation. What we should do now is a matter of conjecture. And so on. If we start with the facts and keep listing facts, self-consciously and with restraint, perhaps we will eventually have a firmer, less ideological ground upon which to make judgments. “Conceptually we may call truth what we cannot change. Metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us,” wrote Hannah Arendt. This issue represents an attempt to look at the facts as stepping stones to grounded conclusions, or at least as windows of information rather than opinion for inclusion in our store of opinions. We have included the debates on the safety of the country, on the Patriot Act and on Homeland Security but we have tried to present these within the context of knowledge about the terms used, the statistics available and the goals achieved or missed. In acknowledging the degree to which language has become the prisoner of ideology, the issue is an attempt to return to basics: first the information, later the interpretation. Perhaps in answer to the question, “Are We Safer?” we should be asking, “Do We Feel Safer?” The answer is apparently no. It is hard to feel safer when we know at heart that we are proceeding along the lines of duplicity in our means of communicating and assessing our current status. The hope is that eventually more knowledge will yield more trust. When we trust that there are facts without spin, perhaps then we can make some conclusions. First the ground, then the sky. Details: New York: The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, 2004. 52p. Source: Issue No. 3: Internet Resource: Accessed March 4, 2012 at http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/Quarterly/fall04.pdf Year: 2004 Country: United States URL: http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/Quarterly/fall04.pdf Shelf Number: 124375 Keywords: Homeland Security (U.S.)Patriot ActTerrorism |
Author: Carlisle, David Title: Targeting Security Threats Using Financial Intelligence: The US Experience in Public-Private Information Sharing since 9/11 Summary: Since the founding of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in 1989, global efforts on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing have rested on the principle that co-operation between the public and private sectors is essential in generating financial intelligence. Recently, however, a consensus has emerged in both the public and private sectors that the frequency and quality of financial information sharing is inadequate. Observers argue that governments do not supply the private sector with sufficient detail about key threats, such as terrorism, for financial institutions to generate high-quality financial intelligence (FININT). On the other hand, private sector reporting of FININT through the traditional Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) process is often slow and inefficient, hindering the ability of governments to act against criminals or terrorists. Fortunately, one relatively longstanding model for public-private information sharing does exist. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in October 2001, President George W Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act. One aim of the Act was to elevate the role of FININT in identifying and disrupting security threats. Two sections of the Act have particular relevance for promoting public-private information sharing to this end: Sections 314 and 311. Set alongside the traditional SARs regime, Sections 314 and 311 help to sustain a robust, if still maturing, public-private partnership aimed at protecting the US financial system against a broad array of illicit finance threats. This paper offers an overview of the aims of US policy, an examination of the US experience in implementing Sections 314 and 311 of the PATRIOT Act, and a consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of the US approach. It also draws lessons from US experience and provides seven principles for policy-makers to consider when developing public-private information-sharing arrangements at the national or international level. Details: London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2016. 42p. Source: Internet Resource: Occasional Paper, 2016: Accessed May 2, 2016 at: https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201604_op_financing_patriot_act_final.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201604_op_financing_patriot_act_final.pdf Shelf Number: 138894 Keywords: Counter-TerrorismFinancial CrimesMoney LaunderingPatriot ActTerrorist Financing |
Author: American Civil Liberties Union Title: Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI's Unchecked Abuse of Authority Summary: The Federal Bureau of Investigation serves a crucial role in securing the United States from criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign agents. Just as importantly, the FBI also protects civil rights and civil liberties, ensures honest government, and defends the rule of law. Its agents serve around the country and around the world with a high degree of professionalism and competence, often under difficult and dangerous conditions. But throughout its history, the FBI has also regularly overstepped the law, infringing on Americans' constitutional rights while overzealously pursuing its domestic security mission. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress and successive attorneys general loosened many of the legal and internal controls that a previous generation had placed on the FBI to protect Americans' constitutional rights. As a result, the FBI is repeating mistakes of the past and is again unfairly targeting immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and political dissidents for surveillance, infiltration, investigation, and "disruption strategies." But modern technological innovations have significantly increased the threat to American liberty by giving today's FBI the capability to collect, store, and analyze data about millions of innocent Americans. The excessive secrecy with which it cloaks these domestic intelligence gathering operations has crippled constitutional oversight mechanisms. Courts have been reticent to challenge government secrecy demands and, despite years of debate in Congress regarding the proper scope of domestic surveillance, it took unauthorized leaks by a whistleblower to finally reveal the government's secret interpretations of these laws and the Orwellian scope of its domestic surveillance programs. There is evidence the FBI's increased intelligence collection powers have harmed, rather than aided,its terrorism prevention efforts by overwhelming agents with a flood of irrelevant data and false alarms. Former FBI Director William Webster evaluated the FBI's investigation of Maj. Nadal Hasan prior to the Ft. Hood shooting and cited the "relentless" workload resulting from a "data explosion" within the FBI as an impediment to proper intelligence analysis. And members of Congress questioned several other incidents in which the FBI investigated but failed to interdict individuals who later committed murderous terrorist attacks, including the Boston Marathon bombing. While preventing every possible act of terrorismis an impossible goal, an examination of these cases raise serious questions regardingthe efficacy of FBI methods. FBI data showing that more than half of the violent crimes, including over a third of the murders in the U.S. ,go unsolved each year calls for a broader analysis of the proper distribution of law enforcement resources. With the appointment of Director James Comey, the FBI has seen its first change in leadership sincethe 9/11 attacks, which provides an opportunity for Congress, the president, and the attorney general to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the FBI's policies and programs. This report highlights areas in which the FBI has abused its authority and recommends reforms to ensure the FBI fulfills its law enforcement and security mi ssions with proper public oversight and respect for constitutional rights and democratic ideals. The report describes major changes to law and policy that unleashed the FBI from its traditional restraints and opened the door to abuse. Congress enhanced many of the FBI's surveillance powers after 9/11, primarily through the USA Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments. Therecent revelations regarding the FBI'suse of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act to track all U.S. telephone calls is only the latest in a long line of abuse. Five Justice Department Inspector General audits documented widespread FBI misuse of Patriot Act authorities in 2007 and 2008. Congress and the American public deserve to know the full scope of the FBI's spying on Americ ans under the Patriot Act and all other surveillance authorities. Details: New York: ACLU, 2013. 69p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 5, 2016 at: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbi-report.pdf Year: 2013 Country: United States URL: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbi-report.pdf Shelf Number: 130020 Keywords: Domestic TerrorismFBIFederal Bureau of InvestigationPatriot ActPolice AccountabilityPrivacySurveillance |