The Patriot Act

Abstract

Before the 9/11 attacks, the United States Congress had been focusing on developing legislation that was aimed at preventing global terrorism. However, following the Oklahoma City bombing that occurred in April 1995, and in which American citizens were responsible for bombing and federal building, attention was shifted to domestic terrorism. As a result, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton as a way of making it easy for the law enforcers to not only identify but also prosecute international and domestic terrorists. Nevertheless, President Clinton’s bill did not see the light of the day given that he had request the Congress to give additional powers to law enforcement so as to have extensive wiretap authority alongside increased access to individual records with regards to terrorist cases and other security matters. The Congress rejected the bill and cited a number of issues including the feeling that the records and loosening surveillance rules was unconstitutional (Welch, 2015). Nonetheless, every bet came off following the 9/11 attacks, which is considered as the deadliest terror attack to occur in the United States. Following the 9/11 attacks and pushed by the increasing number of fear-struck American voters, the Congress requested for recommendations of the United States Attorney general, John Ashcroft, with a distinct eye and this resulted in the overwhelming passing of the Patriot Act.

Introduction

According to Rudolph (2017), the Patriot Act refers to the legislation passed in the year 2001 with the objective of enhancing the aptitudes of the United States law enforcement agencies to identify terrorists and deter any form of terror attack. The official title of the act is USA-PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism). Even though modifications to the Patriot Act occurred in 2015 with the objective of helping to make certain the ordinary Americans constitutional rights, a number of the provisions contained in the act remained increasingly controversial (Vladeck, 2015).This paper has, therefore, been written with the objective of reviewing the Patriot Act and its effectiveness in detecting and deterring terror.

The Patriot Act

Pike (2015) observes that to the Patriot Act mainly extended the Department of Justice’s application of tools that were already in use in tackling drug related crimes as well as organized crimes. The act was, therefore, aimed at enhancing homeland security through enabling the law enforcers to make use of the wiretapping and various surveillance tools in the investigation of the terror-linked criminal activities. The act also allowed the court to authorize the use of roving wiretaps in the tracking of terror suspects. Also, the law allowed delays in the issuing of search warrants to terror suspects so as to prevent them from learning about their suspect status in addition to enabling the federal agents (Vladeck, 2015). The law also permitted the courts to give federal agents authority to acquire business and bank records that are vital in investigation of terror and preventing money laundering as a means of financing terror.

As a law, the Patriot Act was aimed at enhancing intelligence and information sharing between various government agencies, provision of tough penalties for terrorist, and their accomplices, allowing the obtaining of search warrants from the district in which the terror attack took place and ending the various statutes of limitation relating to given terror activities. According to Smith (2015), other objectives of the Patriot Act included enacting stringent laws that would make it difficult for immigrants engaged in terror activities to gain entry into the United States. The act also offered assistance to the victims of terror in addition to providing aid to the public security officers tasked with the investigation and prevention of terrorist acts.

A larger proportion of the requirements made by the Patriot Act had been set to expire in the year 2005; however, the debate on if the act should be renewed or not was carried out by the House of Representative (Welch, 2015). Regardless of the various concerns regarding the breach of privacy and civil liberties, on 9^th march 2006, President Bush signed both the Terrorism Reauthorization Act and the Patriot Act into law.

The USA Patriot Act also increased the Secretary to the Treasury’s powers to tackle money laundering, as well as increase the amount of border patrol, immigration, naturalization service and custom service employees throughout the northern border of the United States (Pike, 2015). The act also enabled the establishment of terror related reasons for the detention and deportation of foreigners and denying them admission to the USA. To attain such authorities, the Patriot Act expanded the description attributed to material support towards terrorists and their organizations to take in the expert assistance and advice, in addition to creating novel terror crimes such as attacks on the mass transit systems (Welch, 2015). Also, so as top effectively allay the various concerns raised by the legislators in opposition to the act, and those who had also questioned a number of provisions constitutionality, the section (224) under the title “Sunset” provided that a total of 16 sections along with an additional two subsections were to stop having effects on 31^st December 2005.

Effectiveness of the USA Patriot Act in Preventing Terror Offenses

Regardless of the concerns and objections raised against the law, a number of individuals and groups have questioned the effectiveness of the Patriot Act with regards to prevention of terrorism. Dependent on what an individual reads and the person asked the question, different opinions are likely to be offered indicating that the Patriot Act might have or might have not attained its goals of preventing terrorism in the United States.

In 2015, the Justice Department is acknowledge to have made the admission that the federal bureau of Investigation agents could not single out any key terrorism-related case that they had successfully cracked regardless of being accorded immense surveillance and snooping authorities by the act (Rudolph, 2017). However, a report released in 2012 by the Heritage Foundation noted that approximately 50 terror related attacks were prevented after 9/11, and that 47 of that were as a consequence of the roles of the intelligence agencies and the law enforcement (Pike, 2015). Moreover, the Heritage Foundation observed that the Patriot Act played a vital role with regards to assisting the law enforcement agencies in the identification of the important leads and prevention of attacks (Pike, 2015). The observations made by the Heritage Foundation were in concurrence with the testimonies and statements of the former director of FBI, Robert Mueller, who observed that the Patriot Act had proven to be unusually advantageous with regards to the war on terror, and that it altered the manner in which the intelligence agency conducted business (Smith, 2015). Mueller also noted that a number of the successes attained through the counterterrorism efforts were as a result of the various helpful provisions of the Patriot Act (Welch, 2015). Mueller additionally maintained that devoid of the various provisions found in the Patriot Act, the intelligence agencies including the FBI would have been forced to their practices before the 9/11 attacks that entailed fighting terror with another hand tied at the back.

Still, in his review of the USA PATRIOT, Vladeck (2015) notes that the act facilitated information sharing alongside cooperation between the various governments agencies to enable them effectively connect the dots. Thus, the Patriot Act did away with the key legal barriers that had put a stop to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies from effectively coordinating their functions in a bid to safeguard Americans and the nation’s security (de Sousa Santos, 2015). The act also removed the restrictions on the government’s efforts by allowing joint investigations between the intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the objective of protecting communities through the disclosure of terrorist plots prior to their occurrence. For instance, pursuant to section 218 of the Patriot Act, the federal prosecutors and intelligence agents employed the information that they shared with regards to the Virginia Jihad case in the investigation of the defendants (Welch, 2015). The prosecution entailed the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center members who had been partaking in Jihad training in Virginia, as well as eight members of the center who had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to partake in terror training by 2001. The persons had been linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which was amongst the violent extremist groups operating in Kashmir and Pakistan and have been associated with Al Qaeda terror outfit. Owing to the outcomes of investigations conducted using information acquired using FISA, cases were brought by the prosecution against the individuals (Welch, 2015). Amongst the eight defendants, six pleaded guilty even as another three faced convictions in March 20014. The charges brought against them included the conspiracy to aid Taliban through material support and conspiracy to engage in a war against the US. The defendants were sentenced to serve prison terms that ranged from 4 years to life

Further, to avert the commission of various terror related crimes, the Patriot Act is seen as having been effective given that it increased the fines and penalties for individuals who aided and who committed various terror crimes (de Sousa Santos, 2015). Thus, the threat to Americans by individuals who finances the bombs is similar to the threat posed by an individual who blows up the bomb. As a result of such threats, the Patriot Act imposed stricter and tougher novel penalties on individuals found guilty of aiding or committing terrorist operations and crimes, either within the United States or abroad (Vladeck, 2015). The Patriot Act also created novel offenses that banned intentional harboring of individuals who are either about to commit or have committed an array of terrorist crimes including the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, destruction of aircrafts, government property bombing, aircraft piracy, nuclear facility sabotage and utilization of the weapons of mass destruction (de Sousa Santos, 2015).To this extent, the act improved the insufficient maximum penalties regarding the different crimes that terrorists are prone to commit including arson, energy facilities destruction, destruction of materials belonging to the national defense and material aid to terror organizations and terrorists.

The Patriot Act was also effective in deterring terrorism in a number of ways including the observation that it improved several conspiracy related penalties. Previous, the laws regarding the terrorism statutes had failed to ban the engagement in conspiracies to carry out the underlying crimes. Owing to the previous laws, the United States was only able to prosecute and charge such conspiracy suspects using the general federal conspiracy provisions that had a maximum penalty of approximately five years in jail (Vladeck, 2015). In addition, the Patriot Act also sought to punish various kinds of terror attacks on the mass transit systems; punish terrorists using biological weapons, and also eliminate the various statutes of limitations for given terror crimes while also lengthening them for certain terror offenses. As from its signing by President George W. Bush, the Patriot Act has increasingly polarized the national security program as it has not only made the efforts towards anti-terrorism effective but also efficient and streamlined. The investigative agencies have been able to employ wiretaps in the tracking of various international terrorists who have avoided surveillance through faster location changes and using diverse communication tools. Further, the logical delay in the notification of the terror suspects of the issued search warrant also enables the law enforcement to effectively identify the associates of the suspect and eradicate the threats to the communities by apprehending the suspects and their allies in time.

Conclusion

In summary, it can be noted that regardless of the alleged noble intents that formed the basis of the Patriot Act, the rule has continued to attract immense debate. For instance, various civil rights and human rights groups have made assertions that the law infringed on the constitutional rights of the citizens of the United States as it allowed the various law enforcement agencies to spy on them devoid of their consents, the due process (de Sousa Santos, 2015). The groups have also observed that the law also allowed the government to search the citizens’ homes and, therefore, increased the chances of ordinary individuals being prosecuted for terror crimes devoid of any just cause. On the other hand, the federal government has maintained that the Patriot Act has a number of safeguards in place, and which are aimed at protecting the Americans’ rights. However, the courts found a number of sections and provisions of the law to be illegal. For example, in the year 2015 the United States Court of Appeal’s Second Circuit made a ruling that the Patriot Act’s Section 215 should not be used in the validation of the mass gathering of the phone records belonging to the citizens (Rudolph, 2017). The successful prevention of any catastrophic terror attack in the United States as from 9/11 by the government would have proven extremely challenging and nearly impossible devoid of the Patriot Act. The powers offered by the congress have considerably improved the aptitude of the United States to avert, carry out investigations and effectively prosecute the acts of terrorism.

References

de Sousa Santos, B. (2015). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide.        Routledge.

Pike, G. H. (2015). Legal Issues: USA Patriot Act Still Raising Questions.

Rudolph, C. (2017). National security and immigration in the United States after 9/11.

Smith, P. J. (2015). The terrorism ahead: Confronting transnational violence in the twenty-first      century. Routledge.

Vladeck, S. I. (2015). The FISA Court and Article III. Wash. & Lee L. Rev., 72, 1161.

Welch, K. (2015). The Patriot Act and Crisis Legislation: The Unintended Consequences of         Disaster Lawmaking. Cap. UL Rev., 43, 481.