I've lately been giving more and more thought about the presidential election this fall. What scares me most about Republicans was their willingness to sacrifice the individual right to privacy in order to supposedly achieve greater protection against terrorism vis-a-vis the Patriot Act (John Ashcroft pushed this passed Congress a couple weeks after 9/11). Among the things that concern me are:

-The FBI need not show probable cause, nor even reasonable grounds to believe, that the person whose records it seeks is engaged in criminal activity.
-The FBI need not have any suspicion that the subject of the investigation is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.
-The FBI can investigate United States persons based in part on their exercise of First Amendment rights, and it can investigate non-United States persons based solely on their exercise of First Amendment rights.
For example, the FBI could spy on a person because they don't like the books she reads, or because they don't like the web sites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy.
-Those served with Section 215 orders are prohibited from disclosing the fact to anyone else. Those who are the subjects of the surveillance are never notified that their privacy has been compromised. If the government had been keeping track of what books a person had been reading, or what web sites she had been visiting, the person would never know.

*Basically, the FBI can put you under surveillance and under investigation because you don't like the color of George Bush's tie or for being critical of government policies. That's a pretty strong way to discourage free speech.

What really scares me is that John Ashcroft (George Bush's attorney general and fellow brother in Christ) is authoring a new Patriot Act enhancement dubbed the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act", which would allow among other things:

-government officials secret access to credit reports (YOUR credit reports) without consent and without judicial process.
-authorize secret arrests in immigration and other cases, such as those involving material witness warrants, where the detained person is not criminally charged.
- allow for the sampling and cataloguing of innocent Americans' genetic information without court order and without consent
-shelter federal agents engaged in illegal surveillance without a court order from criminal prosecution if they are following orders of high Executive Branch officials.
*So basically, if they are following the orders of Dick Cheney to have you illegally watched, there's nothing you can do about it.