DISPATCHES: "But we need to be careful not to allow our growing fear to overtake us. We should avoid rushing ahead with expanded police power, to chip away at the rights and freedoms that make America worth defending in the first place."
By: Hank Kalet
I have to admit, I’m getting a bit nervous.
All this talk of anthrax, of imminent terror attacks, of heightened security has me worried and I’m not the kind of person who panics.
First, three employees of the Sun tabloid in Florida were either infected with or exposed to anthrax spores, with one of them dying. Several other cases followed, including Tom Brokaw’s assistant at NBC, a staffer at Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office and a 7-month-old child of an ABC producer. The letter to Sen. Daschle prompted the closing of an eight-story Senate office building and the testing of hundreds who work there.
Is it any wonder that a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 65 percent of the American public was "at least somewhat concerned about reports that letters containing anthrax bacteria had been sent through the mail. And slightly more than half said they feared that they, a family member or a personal friend could become a victim of anthrax."
That’s one of the reasons the U.S. Postal Service announced Monday it plans to send letters to 135 million homes, businesses and other addresses warning about biological hazards that could be moving through the U.S. mail. It also plans to provide gloves and masks to all mail-handling employees and has assigned most of its 1,900 inspectors and 1,400 postal police officers to focus on the threat.
Of course, police and emergency workers are taking other precautions, many of which make sense in the current climate. Limiting what can be brought onto planes or into baseball stadiums makes sense, as does maintaining a heightened sense of alert.
But we need to be careful not to allow our growing fear to overtake us. We should avoid rushing ahead with expanded police power, to chip away at the rights and freedoms that make America worth defending in the first place.
That’s what House Republicans have done, pushing through an antiterrorism bill last week with little debate. The bill, as The Washington Post said in an editorial Tuesday, "had been anonymously written only the night before."
The bill, known as the PATRIOT Act, was ratified Friday morning by a 337 to 79 vote. The Senate had passed a similar bill, the USA Act of 2001, on Oct. 11.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the bills are troubling for several reasons, the most egregious of which is the expansion of federal wiretap authority.
The bills allow what are known as "roving" or "blank" wiretaps by ending the requirement that wiretaps be tied to specific phones and that they be limited to the specific target’s conversations. The ACLU says these types of wiretaps are barred by the U.S. Constitution because they make it difficult for judges to monitor.
In addition, the bills:
• expand authority for covert searches, allowing law enforcement to search homes, offices and other private places, take photos or download files from computers without notification;
• allow information obtained during criminal investigations to be distributed to national law enforcement groups without judicial review or limits on how federal agencies can use the information;
• allow law enforcement to apply for warrants in any court in any jurisdiction where it is conducting an investigation for a search anywhere in the country, making it difficult for the warrant’s subject to challenge it;
• expand the definition of terrorism in a way that could potentially allow the government to levy heavy penalties for relatively minor offenses, including political protests, making it a potent weapon against political dissent;
• allow the government to detain non-citizens indefinitely, without judicial review;
grant access to the government to personal information, including educational, credit, consumer and communications records.
Many of the bills’ provision may seem to be prudent in these trying times, but it is important to remember that what we do now will have long-term effects on our constitutional freedoms.
And once those freedoms are gone, they are very difficult to win back. That’s why we cannot succumb to fear. The best way to fight back is to maintain the free and open society the Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted the Constitution.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]