Betraying Our Country

    

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If many members of Congress failed to read the Patriot Act during its swift passage, it is in part because that act is almost unreadable. The Patriot Act is written as an extended sequence of additions to and deletions from previously existing statutes. In making these alterations, it often instructs the bewildered reader to insert three words into paragraph X of statute Y without ever providing the full sentence that is altered either in its original or its amended form. Only someone who had scores of earlier statutes open to the relevant pages could step painstakingly through the revisions.
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The hundreds of additions and deletions do, despite appearances, have a coherent and unitary direction: many of them increase the power of the Justice Department and decrease the rights of individual persons. The constitutional rights abridged by the Patriot Act are enumerated in the town resolutions, which most often specify violations of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly, the Fourth Amendment guarantee against search and seizure, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process, and (cited somewhat less often) the Sixth and Eighth Amendment guarantees of a speedy and public trial and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

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The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair.
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The content of the Patriot Act is the principal concern, however. And while it may look like a ticker tape of tiny revisions in the phrasing of previous laws, the content of the Patriot Act goes to the core of our political life: it distorts not just this or that particular feature of governance but the basic act of self-governance itself. Because the privacy of individual action and the publication of government action are both necessary to democratic self-rule (that is, to the debate, deliberation, and decision-making on which self-rule is premised), the major complaint of the local resolutions has been the damage done to the liberties of persons and to the integrity of our laws. The most high-keyed formulation of this worry comes at the conclusion of Blount County's resolution, which calls on all residents to study the U.S. Constitution so that they can resist not only the executive acts that have already been formulated but those that may come in the days ahead: "to study the Bill of Rights so that they can recognize and resist attempts to undermine our Constitutional Republic . . . and declare null and void all future attempts to establish Martial Law, [or] Declared States of Emergency."
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In addition to aiming blows at our legal framework of self-governance and our political convictions about protecting both citizens and noncitizens, the Patriot Act licenses the executive branch to harm other institutions--for example, financial markets and universities--and once again, its blows appear to be structural, to go to the foundations of these institutions.

Take, for example, section 356, which requires bankers, broker-dealers, commodity merchants, and trading advisers to file "suspicious activity reports" (abbreviated SARs) when they notice their clients carrying out unusual actions that entail transferring amounts of money greater than $5,000. In the past, the filing of such reports was wholly voluntary (and the guidelines stipulated $100,000, not $5,000, as the triggering event). Today the act of filing is mandatory. Failure to file is punishable by criminal and civil charges, with fines reaching $10,000
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No section of the Patriot Act has been so widely discussed as section 215, which applies to (though it does not name) both college and public libraries (and, in many cases, bookstores). When approached by an FBI or CIA agent, librarians must turn over a record of the books a specified patron has taken out. The librarian--like the banker who files a suspicious activity report--is not permitted to tell anyone of the intelligence gathering in which he or she has just participated: "No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section." When the U.S.A. Patriot Act was rolling through the empty corridors of Congress in the middle of the anthrax panic, the American Library Association inhabited those hallways too, trying valiantly to introduce an amendment that would exempt libraries from the reach of the act. But according to the American Library Association's own account, they could not even get accurate records of the wording of either the House or the Senate versions and had to rely on "rumor."
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But the aspirations encoded in the Patriot Act--the making transparent of the population and the making invisible of the executive branch--cannot come about without the help of people everywhere. While (in other words) the actions of our executive branch have, like a runaway train, become divorced from the will of the people, here in the Patriot Act the government is still dependent upon its people, and therefore the population can exert, and is exerting, a braking power. It is not the fact that we--as local librarians, or police, or bankers--are being asked to assist that is the problem: a government and its people must be yoked together in a democracy, and the many areas in which they have become unyoked need to be repaired. The problem is not being asked to assist, but being asked to assist in acts of defying the Constitution and betraying our country.

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