President Obama, temporary safety or essential liberty?

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. — frequently attributed to Benjamin Franklin

In just a few weeks, President Obama will have been in office longer than George W. Bush was without a major terrorist attack on United States soil. On September 12, 2009 the talking points of Dick Cheney, asserting that Obama administration policies have made us less safe, will drift further into irrelevance.

This is a good time for reflection on some of the policies the Bush administration put into place in order to combat terrorism, namely the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). Taken from AnswerNote, here are some of the most dangerous and disturbing sections of the USA PATRIOT Act:

• Section 218 amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), authorizing secret searches without public knowledge or Department of Justice accountability, so long as the government can allege a foreign intelligence basis for the search.



• Section 213 warrants -- "Sneak and Peek" -- extend the authority of FISA searches to any criminal search. This allows for secret searches of one's home and property without prior notice.



• Section 214 permits the removal of the warrant requirement for "Pen registers" which ascertain phone numbers dialed from a suspect's telephone and "Trap and trace" devices which monitor the source of all incoming calls, 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. The Act changes the language to include Internet monitoring, specifically information about: "dialing, routing, and signaling." It also broadens such monitoring to any information "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation."



• Section 206 authorizes roving wiretaps: allowing taps on every phone or computer the target may use, and expands FISA to permit surveillance of any communications made to or by an intelligence target without specifying the particular phone line or computer to be monitored.



• Section 505 authorizes the use of an administrative subpoena of personal records, without requiring probable cause or judicial oversight.

Faced with a national security crisis, makeshift laws like this may have somehow made sense to members of Congress and those in the Bush administration at the time. But eight years later, such far-reaching legislation must be revisited at the very least, and eventually repealed. Our country must wake up and realize that such policies, along with U.S.-sanctioned torture and other recent so-called anti-terrorism government practices, do not make us safer; they make us less safe.

When President Obama promised to change the tone in Washington D.C., it would have been truly naive to believe that he would do so. Every politician running for national office pledges to change the way American politics works, but in nearly every case, American politics changes them. So it goes. However, when I voted for President Obama, I did expect him to make substantive changes in policy from the Bush administration, especially in the arena of civil liberties. This is one of the cases where he has failed to do so.

This neglect of civil liberties has been brought to the forefront of national memory by the recent flare up of discussion regarding allegations made by former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge that politics affected decisions on whether to raise the Homeland Security threat level before the 2004 elections. Such a Homeland Security threat advisory system (available for online viewing here: http://www.dhs.gov/files/programs/Copy_of_press_release_0046.shtm) is a vivid reminder of some of the foolish policies our nation was tricked into accepting without much of a debate on the merits. Regardless of the truth behind Mr. Ridge's allegations, it brought the threat level back into the news, if only briefly, demonstrating its obsolescence. In addition to this, more details are being released today of alleged torture techniques used by the CIA and authorized by the Bush administration, including threats of death and threats of assault on family members made to detainees.

I have supported most of President Obama's economic and domestic policy initiatives, including his ongoing push for health care reform, compromising though it may be. Yet when it comes to national security and civil liberties, Obama has been consistently weak, disappointing progressives, civil libertarians, and others concerned about individual liberty. It is somewhat understandable that Obama would wait at least a few months before considering what steps need to be taken on these issues, as many other pressing issues had to be addressed in an immediate fashion, such as the economic crisis he inherited. But patience among those concerned with civil liberties is wearing very thin, and this upcoming grim milestone of sorts is a good time for Obama to revisit these issues and ask himself what most Americans have been asking for a very long time now: Do these policies really make us safer or are they more of a threat than the problems that they aim to solve?