Alive and Still Free

From Investors Business Daily:
Posted 12/13/2005

Patriot Act: Four years of responsible behavior by the feds should count for something, as should four years of effective defense against terrorist attacks.

As the House and Senate prepare this week to vote on renewing the most crucial law in the global war on terror, it's worth nothing two big things that have not happened since Sept. 11, 2001.

First, there has been no major act of terrorism on U.S. soil since then. The toll in America — including such things as the anthrax mailings that killed five shortly after 9-11 — is still remarkably low.

After all, America is the prime target of Islamist terror networks. Effective law enforcement must get some credit, as should the legal tools given to federal authorities in the Patriot Act, passed in the fall of 2001 by overwhelming majorities in Congress.

This brings us to the other dog that didn't bark. Despite much hand-wringing over the imminent death of privacy and other civil liberties under the Patriot Act, real (as opposed to hypothetical) life has not changed much for Americans.

We still live in a free country. Nightmare scenarios — like that of innocent citizens being hauled off in handcuffs for checking out the wrong library book — have not materialized.

The federal government does have more power than before 9-11 to gather data and share it among agencies, notably the FBI and CIA. Use of that power has been watched by a skeptical press and libertarians, both left and right. Patriot Act critics still aren't happy, but they've not turned up major abuses or rights violations.

That lack of hard evidence against the Patriot Act won't stop the debate over the what-ifs. Every power given to government carries some potential for abuse, and the hypothetical should never be completely ignored.

But there is also a four-year track record to consider. Since the Patriot Act was signed into law, the government by all fact-based accounts appears to have used it appropriately. In other words, it's showing itself able to carry out its new wartime security activities while respecting Americans' traditional liberties.

Will it continue to do so? No one can guarantee that, and there will always be a need for oversight from Congress and responsible private groups. But there's also no turning back to the pre-9-11 limits on surveillance and data sharing.

The old rules were adequate for solving crimes and building prosecutable cases. What 9-11 showed was the urgent need to detect suspicious activity, interpret it accurately and thwart terrorist plots before a massacre.

Last week, House and Senate Republicans worked out a deal to extend the Patriot Act provisions that were due to expire this month. Most of the law would be made permanent, with a couple of controversial sections — including one allowing searches of library records — extended for four years. This is a reasonable response to the continuing terror threat and the government's good behavior.

Some Democrats and Republicans have proposed extending the Patriot Act for only three months to prolong the debate over which provisions to make permanent and which to change. And at least one Democrat, Russ Feingold, threatened to filibuster the bill before the Senate this week.

Both moves would send the wrong signal — that America is becoming complacent about terror and is willing to weaken the legal foundations of its war on terror. The Patriot Act needs to be renewed now because it is working exactly as it should.