United Liberty

Upon reading about the teenage kid stripped of due process because of the PATRIOT Act, talk show host Jeff Scott writes, “This is the first time I’ve heard of it being abused.” Not to pick on Jeff, but this isn’t the first time abuse has been reported.

In 2007, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted to abuses of the PATRIOT Act. In fact, there were more than 1,000 instances of the FBI misusing the law, according to the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

It was also the PATRIOT Act that brought down Eliot Spitzer, the ex-New York Governor, who was investigated due to irregularities in his financial transactions. His “crime”? Soliciting the services of a prostitute.

While we may not always hear about these abuses, when you give government the kind of power that the PATRIOT Act “allows,” which is essentially to run roughshod over Fourth Amendment protections, law enforcement is bound to misuse it.