Patriot II/Saving freedom by squelching it

Star Tribune
Aug. 18, 2005

A friend is caught in a quandary. Long eager to hand to her children the best-loved books of her own childhood, she's come upon a volume she hesitates to share. The book? George Orwell's "1984" -- a resonant portrait of a police-state society supervised by a prudently repressive Big Brother. The book-lover's problem? "I'm afraid they won't get it," she says. "I imagine them reading it and asking, 'So what's the point?' "

If public sentiment is any measure, this mother is wise to worry. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. society has crept closer to Orwell's eerie world in too many ways. Its own Big Brother has been keeping a close eye on Americans -- and most have grown accustomed to his gaze.

Such watchfulness seemed only wise in the weeks after the twin towers toppled. That's when Congress passed the Patriot Act, approving in a panic all sorts of emergency surveillance tactics meant to nab terrorists in their tracks. The measure gave government power to search a private home without informing its owner, wiretap a phone without naming a suspect, secretly survey a citizen's e-mails and private records and indefinitely jail noncitizens.

Those measures were necessitated, many felt, by the emergency of the moment. Most were slated to expire at the end of 2005. But four years after the law's passage, "emergency" seems to have become America's enduring state. And so the U.S. Senate and House have opted to pass versions of Patriot Act II just as brazen as its predecessor. Approved just before the summer recess, both versions call for extending the "sunsets" on most of Patriot I's temporary provisions.

Patriot II's easy passage should raise many an eyebrow. Eager to assure the nation's security, lawmakers have ignored the wisdom of the freedom fighters who founded this homeland -- men who recognized liberty as a fragile commodity, the price of which was daring and forbearance. They knew the folly -- indeed, the impossibility -- of defending freedom by forsaking it.

But Americans now appear willing to make this trade -- and have adjusted to this new era of surveillance. In times gone by, government agents curious about a citizen's mental-health records generally had to resort to burglary -- a fact to which Daniel Ellsberg, who slipped the Pentagon Papers to the press, can attest. These days, the Patriot Act empowers the FBI to scoop up any citizen's psychiatric or other medical records pretty much whenever it wants -- even when the citizen in question isn't suspected of a crime. Worst of all, the law forbids doctors, therapists and all other record-keepers from telling the patient that the records have been seized.

This is the sort of privacy invasion this nation was created to prevent. Yet Americans have mustered barely a yawn in response to the news that lawmakers have extended the Patriot Act's most intrusive provisions for years to come. The extension authorized official spying not just on Americans' medical records, but also on their financial dealings and their reading habits at local libraries.

Do lawmakers really believe that the best way to safeguard American liberty is to sabotage it? Instead of mastering the Orwellian art of doublethink, lawmakers assigned to reconcile the two versions of Patriot Act II should seek to banish its most un-American features.