Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2025 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Uncategorized

Protest Backroom Deal to Extend Un-Patriot Act til 2015

Juan Cole 05/22/2011

Tweet
Share
Reddit
Email

There’s an action alert by a supporter of Rand Paul over at Firedoglake saying that an attempt will be made at 5 pm on Monday in the Senate to extend the misnamed ‘PATRIOT Act’ for four years. There will be an attempt to get unanimous consent for the extension, with just a motion to which there should be no objections.

Rand’s alert says,

“The surveillance state’s ability to snoop through your business records, pry into your library book checkouts, monitor so-called “lone wolfs,” and spy on your personal communications through roving wiretaps will be extended until 2015, which “coincidentally” is not an election year.”

Here is a similarly urgent ACLU alert.

The vote is part of a deal between majority leader Harry Reid and his Republican colleagues to sidestep debate and rush the legislation through, which is becoming a worrisomely common procedure as the Democrats continue to abdicate their responsibilities to the Constitution, as Glenn Greenwald has elegantly explained.

The three controversial provisions being extended are the warrantless ‘roving wiretap’, the government’s warrantless access to business and library records, and the ability of the state to monitor non-US citizens at will and in the absence of any probable cause.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has found evidence of FBI abuse of the PATRIOT Act.

The US Bill of Rights says that people have the right to privacy in their personal effects and their communications from government prying except where the police obtain a warrant from a judge. The tendency in the US for the past 40 years has been to chip away at this requirement, giving government agencies more and more unsupervised surveillance authority.

Please let Reid and Mitch McConnell know that we Americans don’t appreciate their gutting the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

—

See also this diary at Daily Kos.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Primary Sidebar

Support Independent Journalism

Click here to donate via PayPal.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter to have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.
Warning! Social media will not reliably deliver Informed Comment to you. They are shadowbanning news sites, especially if "controversial."
To see new IC posts, please sign up for our email Newsletter.

Social Media

Bluesky | Instagram

Popular

  • Regime Change: From Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump
  • War Criminal Netanyahu nominates Felon Trump for the Nobel Prize
  • Why Faith Leaders are standing up to the Largest pro-Israel Christian Lobby
  • Albanese Sanctions: Marco Rubio now Acting just Like Putin, Charging Human Rights Officials
  • Grok's MechaHitler Antisemitic Rant shows how Generative AI can be Weaponized

Gaza Yet Stands


Juan Cole's New Ebook at Amazon. Click Here to Buy
__________________________

Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



Click here to Buy Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


Click here to Buy The Rubaiyat.
Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2025 All Rights Reserved