I've been reasonably pleased (or at least much less annoyed than I expected to be) with our new Republican Congressman Richard Hanna. I was particularly happy he opposed extending provisions of the badly-misnamed PATRIOT Act recently.
Unfortunately, it seems that he needs to come up with his own reasons for opposing it. It seems to be mostly in passages describing the act:
"lone wolf" authority that allows non-citizens in our country who are suspected of involvement in terrorist activities to be monitored under the broad powers afforded by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), even if they are not connected to any overseas terror group or other "foreign power."...
blurs the... distinction between foreign intelligence... and domestic national security investigations....
allows intelligence wiretap orders to follow a target across multiple phone lines or online accounts....differ from the version available in ... cases, because the target of an order may be "described" rather than identified... similar to the "general warrants" the Founders were concerned to prohibit when they crafted the Fourth Amendment.
expanded the authority of the FISA Court to compel the production of business records or any other "tangible thing."
One bit I like from the Cato original is:
So let's stop living in a state of perpetual panic.
From the conclusion of Hanna's piece, it's pretty clear that he agrees.
It could be worse - at least it wasn't a Ph.D. thesis.
Update: I'm trying to decide if this is any better if it's self-plagiarized ghostwriting. Not sure.
Posted by simon at February 23, 2011 7:45 AM in politics (national)