Twenty years ago today President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. The 52,000-word act sailed through Congress under the Orwellian title, “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001.” It passed the House of Representatives within 24 hours and was subsequently rubber stamped by the Senate the very next day with only one lone dissenting vote.

President Bush said the “carefully drafted and considered” measure was “essential not only to pursuing and punishing terrorists but also preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones.”

Perhaps the most egregious of the new “tools” was the widely-expanded use of National Security Letters (NSLs). Originally a weak and rarely-used investigative tool, NSLs were bulked up substantially by the Patriot Act by allowing agents to use them to subpoena telephone, email, and financial information without any oversight by the courts. In the first four years of the Patriot Act, FBI agents used NSLs tens of thousands of times to obtain financial, health, credit, and employment records from businesses, and in many cases, the records obtained included information on individuals who were wholly unconnected with the alleged crimes the agents were investigating.

The Patriot Act also led to the creation of two new federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was stitched together from departments across the entire Federal government, placing them under a single Secretary of Homeland Security. With $49.8 billion in tax dollars at its disposal in 2021 and almost a quarter million employees on the payroll, DHS has yet to prevent a single act of terrorism in the department’s entire existence. Meanwhile, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) has spent two decades attempting to grope its way to establishing safety in the skies. Test after test of the Agency however has shown that up to 95% of the weapons introduced into their security theater make it through the process entirely undetected. The TSA’s track record of finding and thwarting terrorists is non-existent, but several hundred TSA agents have been fired for stealing from passengers over the agency’s lifetime.

It’s unlikely that the public will ever know the full extent of rights violations perpetrated by the state under the auspices of the Patriot Act. What we do know is that, for the better part of two decades, both the old parties stood idly by as these abuses occurred. Under Democratic and Republican presidents and congresses these awful provisions remained on the books, reauthorized with minimal debate and allowing agents of government to creep through the private lives of innocent Americans at will.

It is now more important than ever to
support the Libertarian Party.
We are the only national party that has consistently spoken out against the Patriot Act and the abuses it spawned. No government, and no other person on Earth has the right to violate your privacy. With your support we will continue to fight for your rights every single day.