Later On

The Patriot Act is patently unconstitutional, but we now live in a post-Constitution US, in which the rule is that the various power centers (the Executive and the Courts and Corporations, with Congress more or less a pawn of the Corporations) can do whatever they can get away with. And getting away with stuff is a lot easier if you keep it a secret.

Spencer Ackerman has a good article on this in Wired, which begins:

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? . . .

Continue reading.