Slashdot Log In
Judge Strikes Down Part of Patriot Act
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Sep 06, 2007 01:00 PM
from the but-what-about-the-terrorists dept.
from the but-what-about-the-terrorists dept.
Shining Celebi writes "U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in favor of the ACLU and struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act this morning, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter. In the words of Judge Marrero, this use of National Security Letters 'offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a good start (Score:4, Insightful)
Next on the todo list: throw out the rest of that abomination of a document that is the Patriot Act. It seems more and more often that document is affecting reach of life that go far beyond "national security". I recently had to provide multiple forms of documentation to open a Health Savings Account because of a Patriot Act provision.
Good work, Congress. Protecting our freedoms by removing our freedoms.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: Socialized Medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
So do HMO's.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
More or less wrong than the richest country in the world ranking behind several South American countries in core health statistics?
Look, we don't live in a society of individuals. We haven't for a couple of hundred years. At any given time, there are hundreds of people you depend on just for your mere survival. That's just what the modern economy and its division of labor has wrought. In such an interdependent society, it makes no sense to categorically reject the idea of doing some things for the good of the society, rather than just the good of the individual. I agree it's something that should be used judiciously, but calling it plain "wrong" is ridiculous.
There are enormous social and economic costs stemming from poor social services. Every _individual_ pays this social cost, directly or indirectly. We pay for prisons and policemen to house drug-addicts or the mentally-imbalanced who can't get proper access to treatment. We deal with beggers in the streets, and roving gangs of young people who have nowhere better to go.
So don't think for a minute that the problem is one of individuals paying for society's problems, versus not. It's just a question of how you decide to pay for it.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Informative)
Look, I'm not going to trade bullshit partisan links with you. The WHO knows what they're doing. They deal with this shit "on the ground". I know people who work closely with them, and I trust their opinion a _whole_ lot more than those of some pundits on the internet. The US sucks on _objective_, unarguable measurements. The WHO has a giant database [who.int] of core health indicators for countries around the world. Highlight the United States, and the UK on the first list, then click the "Mortality" checkbox to the right-side of the second list. Compare the core health statistics.
The US wins a few against the UK (deaths due to TB, deaths due to HIV, mortality rate for cancer, years of life lost to diseases), but we lose most of the big ones. Our overall and healthy life expectancy is lower. Our probability of dying between 15-60 is much higher, for both males and females. Our probability of dying under age 5 is higher. Our infant mortality, neonatal mortality, and maternal mortality are all higher (our infant mortality is actually close to last among developed nations). Our injury statistics are much worse.
This is just the UK, by the way, which ranked 18th in the WHO rankings, compared to our 37th. It is also a country whose per-capita GDP is about 30% lower than ours, and whose per-capita expenditures on health care are far lower than ours.
Look, these are the kinds of statistics that matter to people who work in public health. It's the sort of numbers we use to decide which 3rd-world nation to give foreign aid to. It's fairly unpoliticized, and as close as you're going to get to objectivity in this particular debate. And these statistics show that we're quite a ways behind a much less wealthy country, and we spend more money to achieve that state of affairs...
That said, it is certainly the case that the US health care system could use some fixing, but the solution is to take the government out of it, not add more government. We could drastically reduce health care costs by limiting frivolous lawsuits and government red tape. That way, more people could have health care and it would be better to boot.
And will there be fairies and unicorns and magical bunnies too?
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Emergency rooms are the most expensive places to treat people, short of a specialist. Many hospitals are trying to work around that by subsidizing low-cost clinics. It's cheaper to "outsource" their poorer patients out of the ER.
2. The costs are assumed by the hospitals, which means that costs are assumed by the people that actually pay their bills at the hospital. Put another way, assume treating a person costs $1000. Now, say two people walk into the ER to get treated, and only one can pay their bill. How much is the hospital going to bill the other person? That's right - $2000, and that's precisely how health billing is going these days. That's why insurance rates are going through the roof - we're already indirectly paying for the uninsured.
3. Wrecking the credit of poor people doesn't exactly help them not be poor.
Unfortunately, there are few good ways to solve this. We could...
1. No longer require hospitals to take anyone that walks into the ER. This'll drop rates down for everyone with insurance, but will completely screw everyone else. This is probably (thankfully) not an option.
2. Fully socialize our medicine. This sounds great until you realize that people are inherently cheap when it comes to approving taxes, meaning that we're either going to get really lousy care or we're going to throw the country even further into debt (probably both).
3. Semi-socialize our medicine by having the government make up the slack where the private sector can't (or won't) provide care efficiently. Basically, instead of having the hospitals assume all of the risk, we pass it off to the government and let them run the free/low-cost clinics and all that. Unfortunately, the instant you put into place a "catch-all" and remove risk from a system, people tend to become less risk-averse. In this case, that means that more people might opt to go uninsured since they know the government will take care of them anyways, making a bad problem even worse.
4. Let WalMart or some other low-cost innovator run low-cost health care and see if they can get some efficiencies going there. This actually isn't too far off - WalMart's Sam's Club is starting to push low-cost health insurance for small business, for example, and WalMart has also begun selling cheaper medications in select stores. The problem with this is that most people are (understandably) concerned about letting someone with a penchant for selling shirts that don't last six months take control of people's health decisions.
Unfortunately, there's no good answer here, just a bunch of really lousy ones.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amused by the dual-enemies of the folks who've been brainwashed by the Corporate Right: lawyers and media. It seldom occurs to people that when some corporation feeds you something dangerous, or sells you a battery that bursts into flames, or a surgeon comes to work drunk one day and kills your wife, or a credit reporting agency makes a mistake that messes up your life, that a lawyer is the guy who's going to work for YOU to get your back. Believe me, it doesn't just leap unbidden into the mind of some guy who works in a Ford Plant that we need Tort Reforms. It's some blowhard on the AM radio who works for the huge corporations who's selling that load of crap. in the hope that maybe they can start seriously getting away with shit again. And it's not the lawsuits that the corporations bring that are in danger. Don't worry, the RIAA will still be able to sue your ass. "Tort reforms" just means you won't be able to sue them back. It's like the wonderful "bankruptcy reform" that the Republican congress and the Bush Administration unleashed on America. Notice it doesn't prevent Boeing or Countryside from declaring bankruptcy and screwing their investors, it's just to make sure that the guy who earns $45k per year whose kid has spina bifida and the doctor bills break him that is prevented from getting a fresh start by using the bankruptcy laws. Fair and Balanced is the Orwellian catchphrase of the day.
The other boogieman is the "media". Of course, when you are royally fucking most everyone, one way to prevent them from noticing how badly their asses hurt is to tell them that reality really isn't real. You can't believe those pictures on TV of guys with black hoods being electrocuted or ravaged by dogs, because that's the media and we know you can't trust them. And dead bodies floating in downtown New Orleans? Those damn liberal media again. "Hell-fire" says the tan, fat dope-fiend on the radio, "who you gonna believe? Me or your own lying eyes?" How dare you think your president is a dissembling halfwit stuttering prick who's not even a halfway decent liar! It's just the media who makes him look that way, probably with some high-tech photoshop or special effects or something. You know how they are.
Just remember, when the SWAT team rings your doorbell by accident, looking for the crack dealer who lives one street over, or your hooked up because some fat lady on an airplane thought the Egyptian symbol on your baseball cap is an Al Queda secret code and you're suddenly looking at the inside of a cell, you're gonna hope all those lawyers haven't been shipped off to Darfur.
Just remember the story of the late Richard Jewell, a sad sack whose life was destroyed by an overzealous FBI who, oopsie!, accused him falsely of setting a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics. If he didn't have a kick-ass, liberal, New York, ACLU-loving, pinko L.A.W.Y.E.R., he might have spent his last decade in some cinderblock 8x8 with a seatless toilet.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Informative)
That's from Shakespeare. I think I've heard it quoted more than any of his other lines. And every goddamn time it's being quoted by someone who thinks he's speaking against lawyers for the common good, not realizing that line was uttered because a bunch of lawyers makes tyranny a lot harder.
Thank you for knowing what the hell you're talking about. I don't see that enough.
Parent
Patriot Act sins by omission, not comission. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you go through the provisions, most of them seem to be aimed at the proverbial "ticking time bomb" scenario. This wouldn't have helped on 9/11, because the first inkling we had the operation was going on was when the plane was hijacked. At that point the time it would take to get a warrant in Boston vs. Washington DC wasn't an issue. Other provisions pierce the Chinese wall between intelligence and law enforcement. Again that wasn't an issue in 9/11. Had we taken the steps available to us under the old rules, it would have made a difference. Having the same attitude, the new rules would not have made a difference.
If we had done everything we should have in the lead up to 9/11, it is conceivable although not certain that the provisions in the Patriot Act might have made a difference. That is saying something for the Patriot Act in my opinion.
The main problem with the Patriot Act is not what it contains, but what it fails to contain: any provision to hold the executive branch accountable for its use of its new powers. And therein lies the opportunity for a tool of security to become a tool of tyranny. As President Reagan said: trust, but verify. Which means you can trust somebody when any cheating would be made obvious.
The police have the ability to do all kinds of things to you that you wouldn't want them to do, up to and including shooting you dead. This doesn't mean we live in some kind of police haunted dystopia, for the simple reason that there are rules that govern the police use of their powers, and when they exercise those powers they have to answer to the courts as to whether they were using those powers within their lawful limits. That's accountability: it's a philosophy that works.
This by the way is the problem with the administration's wiretapping programs. I'm happy to let them have such programs for the purposes they claim so long as somebody independent verifies they are using it for that alone. If there is no such mechanism, it doesn't matter if the program is being run by Jesus Himself. It's a bad program.
Parent
Re:Patriot Act sins by omission, not comission. (Score:5, Insightful)
You make some fine points but verifying that they are being used as intended isn't enough. There needs to be steep penalties for misuse of the immense amount of power being given.
Of course in my mind the old rules were fine, there was sufficient information to prevent the tragedy much like like the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. The problem was communicating internally to get the right information to the right people at the right time. That doesn't take the PATRIOT Act with its far overreaching changes. Imagine how many billions have been spent because of it and how little it has accomplished to help us. I can't believe that in modern times we still have the same problems with communication. An f'in email could have prevented all of this from happening.
Of course none of this would have been an issue if Congress had been doing it's job initially. There's the real broken link. The wiretapping programs are simply absurd. There is no way to reasonably interpret the constitution to allow such things. The constitution is a document which specifically states what the government can do to us. There is simply no language in there that would allow this invasion of privacy. Combine that with all the search and seizure changes involved in the war on drugs and you've got yourself a pattern. I wish it was as simple as republican versus democrat but there is a long history of this abuse and more laws aren't going to fix it. Someone needs to enforce the laws we already have. We need to get rid of the PATRIOT Act, repeal the war powers act, and get back to some semblance of sanity.
How in the world in this day and age can a president blatantly violate the constitution and remain completely unchallenged? It's simply astounding.
Parent
Re:Patriot Act sins by omission, not comission. (Score:5, Informative)
At the time this was written, it pretty much included everything. Let's blockquote something else here:
Fairly plain language, isn't it? In short, the Federal government doesn't (legitimately) have the right to wiretap, nor does it have the ability to give itself said right. This is _especially_ true if calls are, like you say, property (effects). So, to use the format you used:
1. The government doesn't have the right to wiretap it's citizens without a warrant issued based on probable cause
2. Because the constitution makes no distinction between interstate, intra-state, or international actions with regard to the fourth amendment, international calls are no different.
It's fairly simple - the constitution is an enumeration of the powers of the federal government. It doesn't make any "international" distinction, so either the (federal) government has the right to intercept all calls, or no calls.
Even if the fourth amendment doesn't apply, and the tenth is rejected on the basis of a constitutional lack of a "right to privacy" - I would point out the 9th amendment:
The constitution is, by design, a list of what the federal government can (and cannot in some cases) do, not a list of what the people can do.
Furthermore, if calls are "property", there are potential fifth amendment issues (as well as potential self-incrimination):
And finally, the most important reason - people's behavior changes when they are spied on. As such, it is effectively abridging the freedom of speech:
So, it's illegal, it's immoral, but they do it anyway. Until the constitution is amended, it really doesn't matter what laws congress passes allowing it - it's still unconstitutional.
Parent
Re:It's a good start (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, since over 40,000 people die every year on the highways, [dot.gov] I'd like to see some of that "Homeland Security" money go to guard rails and other safety improvements. I'm far more afraid of the cell-phone weilding blonde than the bomb wielding Muslim!
But wait, that's still chicken feed. Osama should be jealous as hell of a far bigger terrorist - RJ Reynolds, whose poison kills over half a million people yearly! [about.com] the corporate terrorists are truly deadly!
Even Ronald McDonald kicks Osama's ass when it comes to killing Americans. Heart Disease also kills over half a million Americans every year. [americanheart.org]
Hell, even Bush himself is deadlier to Americans than Osama, since well over 3,000 of the soldiers he sent to Iraq (to destabilize the region and drive gas prices up; he's an oil man. Gas was $1 here when he took office, now it's over three times as high) have died there.
Al Quaida? Shit, the tornado that tore through my home town in 2006 [wikipedia.org] miraculously didn't kill or even seriously injure anyone, but look at the destruction of ONE building! [wikipedia.org] The tree behind my apartment looked like a weed someone had stomped on. I saw twisted girders, trailor homes torn in half, five foot diameter trees uprooted, wood splinters imbedded in concrete. If Osama saw what I saw he'd have given up.
So I completely agree with you. That God damned abomination must go! I think the Congress and Senate who passed it and the President who begged for it and signed it should go as well.
-mcgrew [kuro5hin.org]
Parent
Contribute (Score:5, Informative)
You benefit from their work.
They need to eat.
Donate. [aclu.com]
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.gao.gov/ [gao.gov]
I see the ACLU and EFF serving the same purpose, except they're the investigative/defensive arm of the general citizenry.
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
Doug
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Any agency funded by the government, works for the government. For the ACLU to protect the rights of the people, it has to be voluntarily funded by the people directly. The government funding the ACLU is like the Mafia funding the FBI.
2. While the ACLU does do a good job protecting certain rights, the ACLU does a shitty job protecting other rights. When was the last time the ACLU defended people's 2nd Amendment Rights? Or do you want the NRA to be government funded as well?
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst part is that the local DA and the police know it is illegal to do this and do it anyway.
Personally I think we need both the ACLU and the NRA, and as many other groups that want to fight for our civil liberties.
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
2. While the ACLU does do a good job protecting certain rights, the ACLU does a shitty job protecting other rights. When was the last time the ACLU defended people's 2nd Amendment Rights?
The problem I have with this argument is that the NRA is bigger and wealthier than the ACLU. The NRA is way on top of 2nd amendment issues. With a smaller budget, the ACLU is guarding the other 9... well maybe 7 or so amendments in the bill of rights.
Given that there is already a bigger more powerful organization tasked strictly with defense of the 2nd don't you think it's reasonable that the ACLU would leave those fights to the NRA and concentrate their limited resources on the larger problem space they're tasked with?
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO that's a BIG problem. It means essentially that they can pass any unconstitutional law and SCOTUS will take four years before they'll strike it down as unconstitutional. That IMO is really bad.
Parent
Re:Contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes less than two years to vote out a Representative who votes for an unconstitutional law. The founding fathers were relying on the people, not SCOTUS, to defend their constitution.
Parent
In totally unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
In completely unrelated news, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero has been arrested as an enemy combatant who hates freedom as is currently on an airplane in transit to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he will be held indefinitely. Ironically, it is unlikely that this judge will ever see his own day in court.
President Bush has issued a signing statement declaring that the principles of checks and balances and separation of powers is unConstitutional, since "Clearly the executive branch of government is over the other two, or else they wouldn't have called it the 'executive' branch." Dick Cheney couldn't be reached for comment to see which branch of government he is part of today.
Parent
About damn time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About damn time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Absolutely shameless plug (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Absolutely shameless plug (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Where is the "nodamnkidding" tag when you need it?
Now the rest... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now for Congress (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now for Congress (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Now for Congress (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
to be blunt (Score:4, Insightful)
This entire administration offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.
Re:to be blunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
ahem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ahem (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with the "convicted" part, but what kind of frightening world do you come from where a suspected criminal doesn't deserve his or her liberties? I mean, I thought one of the most basic, bedrock principles of American, nay, Anglo-Saxon justice was the presumption of innocence.
Parent
Odds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Should not have been a judge in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic law principles... like the 4th Amendment. Oh, wait, that's what Congress and the President ignored. Good thing someone is actually about enforcing the law. Too bad there are so many who would throw out our most basic of law -- the Constitution -- the second it inconveniences them.
Parent
Re:Should not have been a judge in the first place (Score:5, Funny)
Who let Ann Coulter on
Parent
Re:Should not have been a judge in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The Judicial system: Freedom versus Tyranny (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the U.S. was born, it was understood by all, even detractors, that the Constitution had one purpose: the keep Federal government small and let the individual States be big for those who wanted a big State, and small for those who wanted a small State. People afraid of a North American Union forget that the U.S. was designed this way: a union of States (governments) that agree to one thing: personal rights and responsibilities (these are one thing because they go hand-in-hand).
I'm SHOCKED that we today forget that freedom comes from a lack of government intrusion, NOT from government intrusion. The PATRIOT Act is a simple proof that citizens today have no clue that the Federal government is restrained by the Constitution exactly as it was written. No laws restricting speech, no laws restricting arms, no laws restricting Habeus Corpus, no laws restricting travel or transport, no laws restricting trade, no laws restricting the People's rights beyond what limited powers the central body has. In fact, the only thing the Feds really can do is to make sure the individual States don't trample on the individual's rights to act non-violently how they want to act.
I'm glad to see SOME judges admire SOME parts of the Constitution, but I can only dream of a day when judges understand the non-breathing, non-adapting Constitutional limits on the Feds. When that happens, nothing Congress or a power-hungry President do would become law.
Re:The Judicial system: Freedom versus Tyranny (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The Judicial system: Freedom versus Tyranny (Score:5, Insightful)
We've also lived for over 250 years with a mainstream media that has co-opted, and been co-opted by, the State, working hand-in-hand to destroy freedoms. That is changing, and the Internet is making that change happen. Funny how so much of the web was rolled out by major media entities, only to have it bite the hand that fed it.
I use News.google.com RSS feeds for phrases I am watching, and I'm seeing more than 15% of those news stories come from non-mainstream media entities with a variety of opinions way different than the "eat, regurgitate and vomit the AP and Reuters articles" process that the MSM tends to stick together with.
The web is a massive pool of people who can actually voice their disagreements with the system. As time goes on, and people see they're not alone in fearing and being harmed by the State, we might just find people voting NO to more government, and using the web to congregate as individuals wanting freedom, not tyranny.
One can only hope.
Parent
Patriot act ISN'T patriotic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Patriot act ISN'T patriotic. (Score:5, Insightful)
No child left behind means all children held back.
Healthy forest initiative means clear cutting...
See a pattern yet?
Parent
More partisan crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
Courts these days have very little to do with a codified rule of law - look at all of the Supreme Court cases where major changes in national course have been made by a single person voting along party lines.
This ruling is inevitably going to be appealed, since the government has unlimited funds to drag things through court indefinitely (zero accoutability) and will eventually be brought before the USSC where it will probably be ultimately overturned on a 5-4 vote along party lines. Personally, I think that any case that isn't decided by a margin of at least three should never be allowed to be considered as precedent, and that if a judicial panel can't rule by at least a margin of two then the law should be immediately thrown out as being too vague.
Not out of the woods yet (Score:5, Insightful)
One clause at a time, if we have to. (Score:5, Interesting)
Various parts of The Government Intrusion Act have been struck down over the years, right from the time it was first passed. I was hoping they'd let it just go away through its sunset clause, but they rammed a new version through. So now we start the process anew... go after one part at a time. It may take a while, but it will all eventually go away because Congress and the President overstepped their constitutional authority.
Doomed (Score:5, Informative)
The Government can prevent this kind of challenge by simply declaring that the existence of such NSLs is a State Secret, denying any prospective plaintiffs proof that they have standing. That's exactly what the USSC ruled in the secret-wiretap ruling recently and the Administration is sure to have pointed that out (I don't have a copy of the pleadings here, but given the Administration's fondness for that tactic I can't imagine that they would have missed that one.
Most of the press reports get this wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Read the actual decision. (PDF) [aclu.org] What the court ruled was that the "gag rule" associated with "National Security Letters" was fundamentally unconstitutional as a First Amendment violation. The issue is that the FBI can't impose a "gag order" on someone without court approval.
The previous issue, issuance of National Security Letters without court approval as a Fourth Amendment violation, was dealt with when Congress revised the Patriot Act last year to allow recipients of a National Security Letter to challenge them in court, like a subpoena.
As a classic rule of First Amendment jurisprudence, when the Court finds a First Amendment violation, they strike down the entire statute, rather than trying to patch it. That's what the court did here. The court also stayed the execution of the order pending an appeal, which is likely.
It's a narrow holding. The FBI can still issue National Security Letters without going to court first, but anyone who receives one is now in a much stronger position to argue about it. As a practical matter, if you work for an ISP or telco and get a National Security Letter, your response is "This has to go through our lawyers."
Record Companies (Score:5, Insightful)