It's an acronym.

USA PATRIOT stands for:

Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act

And if you don't know the name, why not use the alias? I suspect it's because they want to be vague and then attach the description to whomever they want to catch.

If you watch the related clip cited above, they're using it now to get warrantless wiretaps for suspected drug cases without tipping off perps most of the time. Very rarely has the USA PATRIOT ACT been used to catch terrorists. And no wonder; in this climate, there's a lot of fear, but the legal tools we have can catch people who want to hurt people when we have competent law enforcement.

A tempered and well-presented comment, gilga. Thank you very much.

But I disagree with every bit of it. :)

I don't think the DOJ came out well at all. The DOJ's Kris begins his first major statement in this clip with, "I don't think..." In fact, in almost all of his televised hearing statements, he repeated uses this tactic. "I think..." "I believe..." And all Americans can ask is, "Wait. You don't know? You didn't prepare with the Judicial Branch in advance of this hearing? Isn't it your job to know or at least have a better understanding than, say, Stuart Smalley?"

Yet Kris seems quite unsure. Or perhaps he's merely unwilling to make a clear statement that forces him to take a higher level of accountability from his position at the DOJ. Hmm...I should try this tactic at my own job and see how far it gets me...

Then Kris steps out on the highly slippery slope to say that having some sort of nebulous "description" is completely sufficient for our government to spy on someone. He says the government doesn't need the actual identity (name, etc) of the particular individual they want to spy on.

Stuart Smalley is as shocked as we are. And here is where he agrees with me (as does our U.S. Constitution) that the DOJ's statement doesn't pass the sniff test. Franken then contradicts it directly from the fruit of our forefathers' toils and follows up with "That's pretty explicit language."

After being showed up by Stuart Smalley, followed by some giggling and loss of composure, Kris responds to say, somewhat unprofessionally, "This is surreal." Yeah, it is. An SNL comedian just schooled the DOJ. It's totally f*cking surreal, guy.

Ah, but here's where we witness Kris' massive fail. Sidestepping 99% of Franken's point and 100% of the Constitution, Kris retreats by stating that "prior to FISA...every court upheld warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

Um...yeah. Foreign? Yes. That part is true. We know. But what about the part about...oh, I don't know...the Americans?

So. What just happened here?

The conversation wasn't going in the direction Kris wanted, so the DOJ moved the topic from being about the Constitution and the Patriot Act infringing upon Americans' 4th amendment rights to now looking purely at foreigners. Same thing Bush & Co. did. Which is less than 1% of Franken's question.

This is further distressing when we look at the real-world cases. Per the Feingold clip also here at M&C, of the 763 "Sneak and Peek" cases of this type of surveillance in 2008, only 3 were used for foreign intelligence.

Three.

So why did the DOJ only respond to what amounts to a minority of cases rather than the hundreds of instances the Patriot Act infringes upon American freedoms? (Aka, the crux of Franken's question?) Hmm, I wonder...

Stuart ends with a terse thank you because he likely knows he won't get anywhere with this guy. But he made his point. We all know the real question wasn't addressed. And warrantless surveillance continues so long as we allow it.

Not a good showing for the DOJ.

And for the record, I'm not entirely opposed to surveillance of either foreign nationals or US citizens. Yep. I'm not opposed to it. In fact, I'm not even opposed to surveillance prior to getting a court order.

Where I do have opposition is when there's no complete paper trail documenting who we're spying on and, most important to me, why we're spying on them. We need complete transparency. So if you're going to spy? You just need to get to the courts and document everything for the American people. We paid for it. They work for us. Are we asking too much?

Only then will we truly know if the Patriot Act is being abused and must be abolished. But for now we don't know for sure. And that is, I suspect, the real reason for Kris and the DOJ's response of obfuscation.

p.s. All of this is further moot if we simply look back again to our forefathers who told us that if we, like children or ewes, give up our liberty for "security" (something that's been distressingly defined for us), we deserve neither.

p.p.s. Keep a look out for my new book! It's almost as long as this comment.

p.p.p.s. Yet I still love Nazis. And watching G20 cops gas old people. Hmm...those two sentences work oddly well together. Weird.