The war on terror has finally, as some critics always warned it would, whipped up a dangerous hysteria. It just so happens that the hysteria has taken hold among critics of the war on terror. They argue that the USA Patriot Act is a combination of the Alien and Sedition Acts and Kristallnacht, in a smear campaign that threatens to roll back policies that have made Americans safer after Sept. 11.
The campaign includes over-the-top editorial writers (The Cleveland Plain Dealer calls the act "the seed stock of a police state"), raving civil libertarians (American Civil Liberties Union: "a disturbing power") and chest-beating presidential candidates (Howard Dean: erodes "the rights of average Americans"). According to Wisconsin's Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, you should sell your stock in Amazon.com -- the Patriot Act has made Americans "afraid to read books."
The challenge to critics should be this: Name one civil liberty that has been violated under the Patriot Act. They can't, which is why they instead rely on hyperbole in an increasingly successful effort to make the Patriot Act a dirty phrase.
Many of the new powers under the act -- such as "the roving wiretap," which allows the government to continue monitoring a target who switches phones -- aren't really new. They give counterterrorism investigators the same powers investigators already have in mob cases. Opponents of the act must explain why Mohammad Atta should have greater freedom from surveillance than Tony Soprano.
The fact is that federal authorities cannot do any of the nasty things under the Patriot Act that critics complain about -- electronic surveillance, record searches, etc. -- without a court order and a showing of probable cause. A federal judge has to sign off on any alleged "violation of civil liberties."
Two particular provisions of the act rile critics. The Republican-controlled House -- demonstrating that uninformed hysteria is bipartisan -- recently voted to ban funding for Section 213 of the law. Under Section 213, law enforcement can delay notifying a target that his property has been searched. These delayed-notification searches require a court order, and they can be used only when immediate notification would jeopardize an investigation.
Such searches already existed prior to the passage of the Patriot Act, and the Supreme Court has upheld their constitutionality. Federal counterterrorism investigators have asked for delayed searches roughly 50 times during the past two years, and the average delay in notification has been about a week -- hardly totalitarianism.