{"id":6007,"date":"2011-09-11T12:19:31","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T12:19:01","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T12:19:01","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=6007","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Civil Liberties Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

NYT: Civil Liberties Today<\/a> by Adam Liptik:<\/p>\n

Criminal law changed surprisingly little after the attacks. How law was enforced is another matter<\/p>\n

——<\/center><\/p>\n

There is a place for alarmism when threats to civil liberties are concerned. Too much worry about our freedoms is better than too little, particularly in the face of a government shrouded in wartime secrecy after the Sept. 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

But there is also a place, a decade later, for sober reflection. By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9\/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes. And even those changes were largely a result of reordered law enforcement priorities rather than fundamental shifts in the law.<\/p>\n

Consider the USA Patriot Act, which was short for this Orwellian mouthful: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. The law, more than 300 pages long, sailed through Congress seven weeks after the attacks with scant dissent. It quickly became a sort of shorthand for government abuse and overreaching.<\/p>\n

The Patriot Act undeniably expanded the government\u2019s surveillance powers and the scope of some criminal laws. But this was, in truth, tinkering at the margins and nothing compared with the responses of other developed democracies, where preventive detention and limitations on subversive speech became commonplace. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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