Last Thursday, Congress voted to extend key provisions of the PATRIOT Act for an additional four years. President Obama, who had criticized the law as a candidate, promptly signed it – or at least his autopen did. Ever since it was first approved in the wake of Sept. 11 attacks, the legislation has provoked a fierce debate in which the most extreme elements on both sides have done a disservice to national discourse. The PATRIOT Act’s loudest critics, seizing on its Orwellian-sounding name and complexity, have spread all sorts of mythical fears, such as the idea that the government would be trolling through everybody’s library records. Its staunchest defenders have also lashed out at anybody raising concerns about its expansion of government surveillance powers, portraying them as insufficiently supportive of fighting terrorism.
The truth is that the PATRIOT Act has provided America’s law enforcement agencies with key tools to fight terrorism. At the same time, the nation must still be diligent about fighting terrorists in a way that safeguards Constitutional liberties. Over the course of America’s history, Presidents have claimed all sorts of emergency powers during wartime. During the Civil War, under President Lincoln’s command, the Federal government arrested an estimated 14,000 civilians deemed disloyal to the Union, and the postmaster general excluded five New York newspapers from the mail because they were critical of the war. President Woodrow Wilson signed a law during World War I banning “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than 110,000 Japanese during World War II.
