Word: patriotism
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Obama’s recent choice to reauthorize the Patriot Act with no additional privacy protections is more than disappointing—it is disingenuous. President Obama campaigned on a platform of transparency and strengthening civil liberties, and, although he made no commitments to letting the Patriot Act expire, he did, according to his own campaign literature, consistently assert that, “He would support a Patriot Act that would strengthen civil liberties without sacrificing the tools that law enforcement needs to keep us safe.” Instead, Obama’s extended support for the tenets...
Indeed, the reauthorization of the Patriot Act was met with overwhelming support in Congress, but this complicity is neither proof of the efficacy of the Patriot Act nor does it justify this continued infringement on a right to privacy. Similarly, the dearth of successful terrorist attacks since 9/11 is not an adequate indicator that we have been made safer by the Patriot Act—to conjecture as such is to ignore the complex matrix that defines national security...
...what the Patriot Act certainly does symbolize is the erosion of the right to privacy that the Supreme Court has ruled is implicit in a number of constitutional amendments, including the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments. Even without the question of the value being brought to bear, a sacrifice of freedom is not in service of either American values or the U.S. Constitution...
This is not to say that there are absolutely no protections evident in the Patriot Act. But we do assert that the privacy protections that are present—which include court authorizations—are inadequate safeguards against the government’s abuse of power...
...cannot deny that President Obama’s Feb. 27 reauthorization of key provisions of the Patriot Act compromises his pledge to scale back the Bush-era surveillance state. However, his reversal is not the product of politically expedient cowardice; it is the responsible act of a commander-in-chief placing national security before naïve ideology...