USA PATRIOT Act

A government of the people, for the people, and by the people can't survive if it is shrouded in secrecy from the people.

As the 110th Congress wrapped up its first session with every member raring to get away for August recess, the Bush administration bullied a Democratically- controlled Congress into passing a law that amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to give the executive branch even more power to spy on Americans without a court warrant. And a spineless Congress caved.

As periods of social and political conflict confront the state there is often a corresponding period of lost liberty. In America this is a phenomenon seen during the era of Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism and CoIntelPro. Historically there appears to be a cyclical rise and fall of American liberty. Using reflective analysis many feel this cycle is responsible for the current state of the country.

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — When officials in Summit invoked the USA Patriot Act to justify kicking homeless people out of its train station in June, the move was ridiculed in many quarters. Even the U.S. Justice Department said the city had no business applying the anti-terrorism law to justify its treatment of the homeless.

But now that the federal government has issued a warning in the aftermath of the London bombings that terrorists may pose as homeless people to study buildings and mass-transit stations while plotting future attacks, no one is laughing anymore.