What does the PATRIOT Act do?
What does it not? The PATRIOT Act is the single most invasive law ever passed in the entire history of the United States. It stripped away almost all of the hard-won protections that followed the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals of the 1970s, and created powers that J. Edgar Hoover (and Ronald Reagan) only dreamed of. Not even the McCarthy era saw laws like this one. The PATRIOT Act made sweeping and unprecedented changes to civil liberties, habeas corpus, Federal powers of surveillance, and many other facets of US law. It also granted new powers to the Justice Dept., allowing it to order massive surveillance, break-ins, and even secret detentions with almost zero judicial oversight of any kind. The PATRIOT Act empowers the FBI to seize “any tangible thing”, including books, letters, diaries, library records, medical and psychiatric records, financial information, membership lists of religious institutions, and even as Attorney General Ashcroft himself conceded in testimony before Con
