The Patriot Act for Dummies

http://slate.msn.com/id/2087984/

 

 

Act 1) Section 215 modifies the rules on records searches. Post-Patriot Act, third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical, church, synagogue, and mosque records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it's trying to protect against terrorism.

Act 2) Secret searches can now be authorized by a secret court without public knowledge or Department of Justice accountability, so long as the government can allege there is any foreign intelligence basis for the search.

Act 3) "Pen registers" ascertain phone numbers dialed from a suspect's telephone; "Trap and trace" devices monitor the source of all incoming calls. Neither reveals the content of communication. Patriot removes the warrant requirement for these taps so long as the government can certify that the information likely to be obtained is "relevant" to an ongoing investigation against international terrorism.

Section 216 clarifies that pen register/trap-and-trace authority applies to Internet surveillance. Until now, it was at the whim of judges and the Justice Department whether the rules for phone taps applied to the Internet as well.

Section 206 authorizes roving wiretaps: taps specific to no single phone or computer but to every phone or computer the target may use. It doesn't get as much attention as it should. If the government decides to tap a computer at the UCLA library, every communication by every user can theoretically be intercepted.

Act 4) Section 505 authorizes the use of what's essentially an administrative subpoena of personal records. The subpoenas require no probable cause or judicial oversight.

Section 802 creates a category of crime called "domestic terrorism," penalizing activities that "involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States," if the actor's intent is to "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."

Section 411 makes even unknowing association with terrorists a deportable offense.

Section 412 allows the attorney general to order a brief detention of aliens without any prior show