I am glad that this happened. I do feel like we need to have legislation that helps law enforcement in regards to terrorist investigation, but I don't think the PATRIOT Act in full is the way to go.
I recently did a paper on the PATRIOT Act for school. I was mostly covering privacy issues via electronic media but in the process I learned a lot about the Act and all the other aspects of it.
It is too encompassing of a document. Parts of it are really great, and should be adopted but as a whole, it really does infringe on people's rights and liberties and I think that by giving up our rights for security, we are just doing what the terrorists want.
The PATRIOT Act may have been the right thing to do immediately following 9/11/01 (although some would argue not even then) but now that we are past the initial panic and response to those attacks, it is time to sit down, break it down and figure out what should stay and what should go.
If Congress had just passed it without question, I would be a little worried. We need to protect ourselves while being sensible about what type of country we want to be at the same time.
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I pray that nothing happens though while we wait for the Act to be rewritten - heads will roll if something does. My bigger beef is pork and lobbying, no one who has ever worked for the government should be allowed to become a lobbyist and why not get rid of them all together. Pork makes me sick - sneaky, sneaky way for Bills to get passed. I would have liked to see the line item veto, whether president was pub or crat and some of that pork would have stayed on the hog!
It's about time they have a real conversation about a sweeping, secret, scary sweep of civil liberty changes! If we give up all our freedoms to fight terrorists, we haven't defended our way of life anyway.
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