rrsafety's summary of the Patriot was kind of funny, everything it did was taken at face value (perhaps from reading the titles of sections). If you dwell down into the details, things don't look nearly as pretty.

Let's take the section that rrsafety stated would: "The Patriot Act facilitated information sharing and cooperation among government agencies ..."

Sounds good, why would anyone be opposed to that? In the past there were two types of wiretaps. The normal type is used by law enforcement, and in theory requires strict court oversight before it can be started. In reality well over 99% of wiretap requests have been granted, so I don't think the court oversight was much of an issue.

The second type of wiretap is used by intelligence services, and does not require much evidence to start. In theory a secret court can review these wiretaps for abuse, but historically, the court has never publicly found any abuse (until after the Patriot act was passed). Congress was afraid that law enforcement agencies would abuse this “easier” method of wiretapping, so they put a provision in that evidence obtained by this method could not be submitted in court (it could still be given to law enforcement agencies, who would have to properly follow the rules of evidence when building their court case).

The Patriot act essentially erased the barrier of sharing evidence between the two types of wiretapping, which in effect means that it greatly reduces the amount of court oversight of wiretapping. It allows agencies to go on a fishing expedition (essentially warrant-less searches) using the secret wiretaps, and than use the information that they improperly gained in court.

The ironic part of the Patriot act is that over 90% of the act does not grant new powers to law enforcement agencies -- instead it reduces or removes court oversight of the executive branch (DOJ, FBI, Secret-service, etc.). Remember how the Patriot act was written – it was essentially a Department of Justice wish list, which was passed almost unread by a panicked congress in the wake of 9/11.

Almost none of the Patriot act measures would have prevented 9/11. I suspect much of the act actually will remain unused -- because it was one-sided (DOJ) and hastily passed. The strongest praise the authors and supporters of Patriot have is that it has not “lead to widespread abuses” as feared by the critics of the act. Two comments: first we don’t actually know that abuses have not occurred, since so much oversight has been removed (this is even true for congress, the DOJ has stonewalled giving congress information by saying they are no longer required to give it). The second is a simple observation that even without public abuse, the Patriot act makes that abuse legal and there is no guarantee that it won’t be abused in the future. It is a deeply flawed act, and deserves to be sunstetted.