On the recordMay 31, 2015
The people who argue that the world will end and that we will be overrun by jihadists tonight are trying to use fear. They want to take just a little bit of our liberty, but they get it by making us afraid. They want us to fear and give up our liberty. They tell us that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear. That is a far cry from the standard we were founded upon--innocent until proven guilty. One of the objections I tried to bring forward earlier but was interrupted repeatedly was that the PATRIOT Act was originally intended to go after foreigners and terrorists. We allowed a less-than- constitutional standard. We didn't ask for probable cause; we just said it had to be relevant, the information had to be relevant to an investigation about terrorists. But here is the problem, and this is one of the big problems I have with the PATRIOT Act. We now use parts of the PATRIOT Act to arrest people for domestic crime. Section 213, sneak-and-peek, where the government can come into your house, place listening devices, never announce they were ever in your house, and then leave and monitor your behavior and never let you know they were there, is being used 99.5 percent of the time for domestic crime. So, little by little, we have allowed our freedom to slip away. We allowed the Fourth Amendment to be diminished. We allowed the narrowing loss of something called probable cause. People say: Well, how would we get terrorists with that?…
