PATRIOT overview

Photo by Luis Testa

LONG BEACH, Calif. -With recent condemnation of the New York Times for reporting on the government use of its “sneak and Peek” approach to the war on terror, civilians were able to see how news gatherers are able to shine the [rare] spotlight on the government’s use of the reauthorized PATRIOT Act.

On March 9th, 2006 President Bush, surrounded by House and Senate representatives, signed the reauthorization bill of the PATRIOT Act adding the “follow the money” theory. According to the White House web site, the bill enhances penalties for terrorist financing. Closing a "loophole" concerning terrorist financing through informal money transfer networks. These are the networks that the New York Times revealed in late June 2006.

“The New York times was free to do that,” Craig Smith, Cal State Long Beach Director of the Center for First Amendment Studies said. “Except they needed to think about if they were endangering National Security.”

Smith did an overview of the patriot act to see if events in the past were “more severe than legislation passed before” and concluded that there were laws that were put into effect in past crisis, which were more severe than that of the PATRIOT Act.

Under The Alien seditious Act, Newspaper editors that were critical of the president were put in jail, Smith said. In World War II a journalist revealed that the United States had broke the German code, Germans found out and changed it, causing many U.S. lives to be lost, he said. Making the Journalist job very sensitive when reporting the government’s business in war.

The PATRIOT Act, formed on October of 2001, a few weeks after the 9/11 disaster left millions of Americans in fear.

CSULB Sociology student, Maria Arias, believes the Act -intended for to benefit the people- is benefiting the government to further surveillance that does not benefit the war on foreign terrorists; giving them the right “to do as they please.”

“The PATRIOT Act infringes some of the things that we have taken for granted as freedoms,” Smith said.

The Washington Post reported the of over 200 people accused of terrorist related crimes, but only 39 people were convicted, Chuck Baldwin said in a report. Tova Wang of the Century Foundation said that the government is labeling as potential terrorists civilians related to crimes that involve money laundering, Sex crimes, Internet hacking and drug related incidents.

“The government needs to do what it needs to do to take care of its citizens,” Smith said. “What people worry about is that they use that as an excuse to go after other people for crimes that are unrelated to terrorist activities and that becomes part of the problem.”

Student Journalist, Sara Esquivel, feel that the PATRIOT Act can affect a studnet research in public universities libraries abut Muslim, Palestine, or Islamic cultures. Since with the Act, Government officials like the FBI, could see these research topics as [red alerts] in a terrorist activity.

According to a report by J Oneill of the Dallas Morning News, Universities are pushed to comply with a federal communications commission law to “change routers and switches" to make it easier to wiretap and eavesdrop Internet based communication.

“As a professor I could do research on topics and don’t expect the government to be monitoring what I’m checking out of my school library, what I’m doing online, who I’m e-mailing,” Smith said.

But the patriot act does just that.

Cal State Long beach student, Hector perez commented reading, “This Phone is Tapped” in fine print underneath a near by public phone.

Article 215 of the patriot act states that the FBI could seek an order to search under the production of any “tangible thing,” which includes papers, notes, records and documents. The Privacy Act, which protects newsroom searches by officials, will not protect a newsroom covering the government on terrorist activities if they have a reason to believe a news gatherer may be involved with anything that categorizes them as a terrorist. Furthermore, Acording to the American Library Association section 215 will also forbid the search to be revealed. However, the Reauthorized PATRIOT Act can now be challenged after one year of the search if the government acted in ‘bad faith.’

Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times, which also ran the story about foreign currency transfers, said in a report that the press has the obligation to cover the government and help citizens make their own decision on activities that can threat civil liberties. He also said that covering these issues is “the role of the press in our democracy,” a report by LA Times said.

“It is scary to think how long this law will go in to effect, or if it will continue to restrict even more of our rights,” Arias said.

Smith noted that as we come out crisis that infringed our rights, we have straightened the First Amendment when we have come out of those types of situations. The government tends to restrict our rights to protect national security, but when the crisis is solved the government will restore those rights, Smith said.

“Hopefully when we get over the security problem of the United States will again return to a very strong First Amendment,” Smith said.

To find out more information abut Cal State University Long Beach First Amendment Center please go to csulb.edu. For information on the Reauthorized PATRIOT Act please visit whitehouse.gov. To contact writer please e-mail at Ltesta@csulb.edu.