The Patriot Act violates the intention of the Constitution

From Crooks and Liars
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Remember when we were told that the scary powers of the Patriot Act would only be used against terrorists? Good times! Imagine an open-ended, secret audit of your business finances -- just in case. Just as we saw RICO abused by the FBI in the 80s and 90s, now they're using the Patriot Act to sidestep the legal process for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Michael Isokoff:

    The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year - a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

    The FBI's increased use of the Patriot Act's "business records" provision - and the wide ranging scope of its requests -- is getting new scrutiny in light of last week's disclosure that that the provision was used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of telephone calls.

    Taken together, experts say, those revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court accepted that broad interpretation of the law.

    "That they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is definitely the biggest surprise," said Robert Chesney, a top national security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. "Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We've gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It's incredibly sweeping."