Early America had the Alien and Sedition Acts. World War Two had the internment of the Japanese. The Red Scare had the arrest of hundreds of suspected communists. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have the Patriot Act.
I can't accept it. As a peace-protesting liberal foreign-born Indian college student, I feel like the government is after me for everything I am. The truth is, the Patriot Act was drafted months before Sept. 11, not as a result of it. It isn't just a conservative or a liberal issue: the ACLU, the American Christian Union, the NRA and all sorts of ideologically diverse groups are finally standing up to this together. It's time that students voiced their concerns on some of the ridiculous clauses. Here's one of the most elementary clauses of the act.
Section 215: The private data clause. Section 215 allows the government to search through your library records, financial history, video rentals, religious service records and other previously private data in the name of protecting against terrorism. Over 545 libraries have been asked for book records. John Ashcroft can do this all without your consent, and now even without probable cause. Now, the House Judiciary Committee has stated that a citizen cannot be searched "solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution."
Wait, what is a tipping factor then? Race can be a tipping factor. Citizenship status can be a tipping factor. If John Ashcroft doesn't like your face, that can be a tipping factor. Dartmouth prides itself in its racial diversity: Do you know someone who might be considered racially diverse? Tell that racially diverse person that he is subject to a records search without a warrant without any probable cause.
International students are even worse off. Section 412 allows the attorney general to "briefly" detain aliens, and without cause. Section 411 makes it a deportable offense to be associating with a terrorist or terrorist organization, even unknowingly.
For citizens, meet Section 206: the roving wiretap. If the federal government wants to wiretap someone from Dartmouth, faculty or student, they can now legally use a roving wiretap, which instead of monitoring just one phone, taps every phone that the "suspect" might possibly use.
Combined with Section 216, which extends wiretap rights to Internet- monitoring rights, Section 206 permits taps on every computer that a suspect may use. The government can use its unfriendly Internet monitoring tool, appropriately named "Carnivore," to tap an entire Internet network. Technically, if the government wants to find out more information about just one member of the Dartmouth community, a roving phone and Internet tap could be placed on the campus as a whole, and any questionable email or data transfer by anyone could lead to prosecution.
Students on the Georgetown campus have been worried about their rights: Georgetown is one of many college campuses across the U.S. in compliance with the FBI for screening and tracking down "suspicious" students on college campuses. Their campus security officers report any suspicious activity to the federal government. One of our Safety and Security officers, Sergeant Cummings, said that if they noted any suspicious activity, they would report it and it might end up eventually in General Council, who was unavailable for comment.
Though Safety and Security also reported that it could not search through our library checkout records, and Baker library officials noted that specific books were not removed from the stacks after Sept. 11, we should still watch out. Statistics on security reports of criminal activity at the college were available at the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) website, indicating that Dartmouth forwards its reports to the federal government. In fact, the OPE website indicated that colleges were required to report criminal activity in a timely fashion. The Patriot Act extends definitions of questionable activity as far as religious or political group gatherings on campus.
I would love to discuss which colleges have been tapped and how many students have been interrogated, but the truth is that I don't have this information. Congress doesn't have this information -- when the House Judiciary Committee asked for this information, they were denied any details. The Patriot Act cleverly shrouds its actions in secrecy from the public to keep them ignorant of what gross abuses it has sanctioned.
There are many more little Easter eggs hidden within the Patriot Act. Librarians with secret gag orders, secret arrests, secret trials, and secret deportations plague the Patriot Act, as the president of ACLU noted on Tuesday. This is the National Week of Student Action to Oppose the Patriot Act: what should we do? In opposition to the Alien and Sedition acts, Jefferson and Madison passed the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. They nullified them. Many bills are being drafted in Congress restrict or even repeal the Patriot Act. I prize my right to freedom of expression and dissent. Let us tell our elected officials what we think.
