Do you know that much-feared provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows the feds to look into library and bookstore records? Jeff Jacoby says “It’s a crock” in “Patriot Act no threat to libraries”:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that in the three and a half years since the Patriot Act was enacted, Section 215 has been used 35 times -- but only to obtain driver's license, credit card, and telephone records, not library or bookstore reading lists. Deeply invested though some of the law's critics may be in the notion that the Bush administration lives to pry into the reading habits of law-abiding Americans, there is simply no evidence to back it up.When has that stopped the conspiracy theorists on the Left?
2 comments:
Totally agreed. The paranoids needs to get a life, or drink some coffee or something.
I'm a fan in general of the PA. In fact, I read the whole text when everyone started getting so upset about it, and I found very little in it that didn't make sense. But the library/bookstore part always bugged me for some reason. The fact that it hasn't been used in three years indicates to me that at least this portion of the Act is fairly useless and should be allowed to sunset, or outright repealed.
Nice blog, BTW. Just started reading two weeks ago.
By that logic, I suppose you and Jacoby'll be coming out in strong favor of the much-feared estate "death tax," too? After all, it's so infrequently applicable in real life that most regular law-abiding Americans have nothing to worry about. Why, a person would have to be some sort of raving tin foil hat wearer to oppose the estate tax's existence.
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