U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

So it really is about  behaviours that aren't related to terrorism
All those naif librarians worrying about governmental intrusions-well they
just got it wrong.

NYTIMES
By Eric Lichtblau
Sept. 28, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/politics/28LEGA.html?hp

The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act perhaps its most
essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with
increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or
no connection to terrorism.

..

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail
and electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive
nonterrorism investigations," including the tracking of an unidentified
fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's
trade secrets, the report said.

Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report represent
only a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism cases pursued
under the law.

..

Officials with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have seen
a sharp spike in investigations as a result of their expanded powers,
officials said in interviews.

A senior official said investigators in the last two years had seized
about $35 million at American borders in undeclared cash, checks and
currency being smuggled out of the country. That was a significant
increase over the past few years, the official said. While the authorities
say they suspect that large amounts of the smuggled cash may have been
intended to finance Middle Eastern terrorists, much of it involved drug
smuggling, corporate fraud and other crimes not directly related to
terrorism.

...

Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, a liberal
group that has been critical of Mr. Ashcroft, said the Justice
Department's public assertions had struck him as misleading and perhaps
dishonest.

"What the Justice Department has really done," he said, "is to get things
put into the law that have been on prosecutors' wish lists for years.
They've used terrorism as a guise to expand law enforcement powers in
areas that are totally unrelated to terrorism."

...

A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm
of Congress, concluded that while the number of terrorism investigations
at the Justice Department soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, 75 percent of
the convictions that the department classified as "international
terrorism" were wrongly labeled. Many dealt with more common crimes like
document forgery.

... Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the
Judiciary Committee, said members of Congress expected some of the new
powers granted to law enforcement to be used for nonterrorism
investigations. But he said the Justice Department's secrecy and lack of
cooperation in putting the legislation into effect made him question
whether "the government is taking shortcuts around the criminal laws" by
invoking intelligence powers - with differing standards of evidence - to
conduct surveillance operations and demand access to records.

.. 

There are many provisions in the Patriot Act that can be used in the
general criminal law," Mark Corallo, a department spokesman, said. "And I
think any reasonable person would agree that we have an obligation to do
everything we can to protect the lives and liberties of Americans from
attack, whether it's from terrorists or garden-variety criminals."

___