Your every move.

On November 11, 2003, former President Jimmy Carter condemned U.S. leaders' attacks on American civil liberties, particularly the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act). Speaking at a gathering of Human Rights Defenders on the Front Lines of Freedom at the Carter Center in Washington, D.C., Carter said that post-9/11 policies "work against the spirit of human rights" and are "very serious mistakes." Egyptian human rights activist and sociology professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim added, "Every dictator is using what the United States has done under the Patriot Act to justify human rights abuses in the past, as well as a license to continue human rights abuses."

Since its passage in October 2001, the Patriot Act has decimated many basic American civil liberties. The law gives broad new powers to domestic law enforcement and international intelligence agencies. Perhaps worse still, it eliminates the system of checks and balances that gave courts the responsibility of ensuring that these powers weren't abused. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an electronic privacy watchdog group, believes that the opportunities for abuse of these broad new powers are immense.

A particularly egregious part of the Patriot Act gives the government access to "any tangible things." This section grants the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the authority to request an order "requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)" relevant to an investigation of terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. Although the section is entitled "Access to Certain Business Records," the scope of its authority is far broader and applies to any records pertaining to an individual. This section, which overrides state library confidentiality laws, permits the FBI to compel production of business records, medical records, educational records, and library records without showing probable cause.

Many aspects of the Patriot Act unfairly target immigrants. The attorney general has the ability to "certify" that the government has "reasonable grounds to believe that an alien is a terrorist of is engaged in other activity that endangers the national security of the United States." Once that certification is made and someone is labeled a potential threat, the government may detain him or her indefinitely--based on secret evidence it isn't required to share with anyone.

Currently over thirteen thousand Arab and Muslim immigrants are being held in deportation proceedings. Not one of them has been charged with terrorism. Most are being deported for routine immigration violations that normally could be rectified in hearings before immigration judges. Families are being separated and lives ruined because of selective enforcement of immigration laws that have been on the books for many years and are now being used to intimidate and deport law-abiding Arab and Muslim Americans. Fear and confusion are pervasive in the Arab-American community today. Many people are too afraid to step forward when they are harassed on the job or fired, when they are denied housing because of their last name, or when a family member is picked up by immigration authorities and detained in another state on evidence that remains undisclosed to both detainees and lawyers alike. According to Karen Rignal's article "Beyond Patriotic" on Alternet.org, some of these people have been detained for as long as eight months, mistreated, and confined twenty-three hours a day. Some Arab immigrants have opted to return to the Middle East because they no longer feel welcome in the United States.

Nearly seven hundred men are being held at "Camp X-Ray" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But it isn't just "foreigners" who are being deemed dangerous and un-American. For example, there is Tom Treece, a teacher who taught a class on "public issues" at a Vermont high school. A uniformed police officer entered Treece's classroom in the middle of the night because a student art project on the wall showed a picture of Bush with duct ape over his mouth and the words, "Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth." Residents refused to pass the school budget if Treece wasn't fired, resulting in his removal.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to help a fifteen year-old who faced suspension from school when he refused to take off a T-shirt with the words "International Terrorist" written beneath a picture of Bush. And there was the college student from North Carolina who was visited at home by secret service agents who told her, "Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material." She refused to let them in but eventually showed them what she thought they were after, an anti-death-penalty poster showing Bush and a group of lynched bodies over the epithet "We hang on your every word." The agents then asked her if she had any "pro-Taliban stuff."

Then there's art dealer Doug Stuber, who ran the 2000 North Carolina presidential campaign for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. Stuber was told he couldn't board a plane to Prague, Czech Republic, because no Greens were allowed to fly that day. He was questioned by police, photographed by two secret service agents, and asked about his family and what the Greens were up to. Stuber reports that he was shown a Justice Department document suggesting that Greens were likely terrorists.

Michael Franti, lead singer of the progressive hip hop band Spearhead, reports that the mother of one of his colleagues, who has a sibling in the Persian Gulf, was visited by "two plain-clothes men from the military" in March 2003. They came in and said, "You have a child who's in the Gulf and you have a child who's in this band Spearhead who's part of the resistance." They had pictures of the band at peace rallies, their flight records for several months, their banking records, and the names of backstage staff.

A report by the ACLU called "Freedom Under Fire" states, "There is a pall over our country. The response to dissent by many government officials so clearly violates the letter and the spirit of the supreme law of the land that they threaten the very underpinnings of democracy itself."

In the face of these cases and many more, Justice Department spokespeople have repeatedly claimed that the Patriot Act doesn't apply to Americans. But this is false. First of all, under the Patriot Act the four tools of surveillance--wiretaps, search warrants, pen/trap orders, and subpoenas--are increased. Second, their counterparts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows spying in the United States by foreign intelligence agencies, are concurrently expanded. New definitions of terrorism also increase the amount of government surveillance permitted. And three expansions of previous terms increase the scope of spying allowed. The Patriot Act provides a FISA detour around limitations on federal domestic surveillance and a domestic detour around FISA limitations. The attorney general can nullify domestic surveillance limits on the Central Intelligence Agency, for example, by obtaining a FISA wiretap where probable cause cannot be shown but the person is a suspected foreign government agent. All this information can be shared with the FBI and vice versa.

In sum, the Patriot Act allows U.S. foreign intelligence agencies to more easily spy on U.S. citizens and FISA now provides for increased information sharing between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence officials. This partially repeals the protections implemented in the 1970s after the revelation that the FBI and CIA were conducting investigations on thousands of U.S. citizens during and after the McCarthy era. The Patriot Act allows sharing wiretap results and grand jury information when that constitutes "foreign intelligence information."

In response to other criticisms, Justice Department spokespeople have also claimed that the Patriot Act applies only to "terrorists and spies" and that the FBI can't obtain a person's records without probable cause. As one might expect, all of this is false as well.

The Patriot Act specifically gives the government and the FBI authority to monitor people not engaged in criminal activity or espionage and to do so in complete secrecy. It also imposes a gag order that prohibits an organization that has been forced to turn over records from disclosing the fact of the search to its clients, customers, or anyone else.

Furthermore, in other statements, federal officials contradict themselves by saying that the government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected blackmailers, drug traffickers, money launderers, pornographers, and white-collar criminals. Dan Dodson, speaking to the Associated Press this past September on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, reported, "Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases.

A guidebook used in a 2002 Justice Department employee seminar on financial crimes says: "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?"

Eric Lichtblau, writing in the September 28, 2003, New York Times, reveals that a September report to Congress from the Justice Department "cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism. In them, federal authorities have used their expanded power to investigate individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance of seize millions in tainted assets." In one case, e-mail and other electronic evidence made possible "the tracking of an unidentified fugitive and an investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets." In other instances, expanded federal authority was used "to investigate a major drug distributor, a four-time killer, an identity thief and a fugitive who fled on the eve of trial by using a fake passport." The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has benefited as well. Lichtblau provides information from a senior official that "investigators in the past two years had seized about $35 million at U.S. borders in undeclared cash, checks and currency being smuggled out of the country," much of which "involved drug smuggling, corporate fraud and other nonterrorism crimes." Furthermore, officials in the Justice Department have indicated that the examples cited in the report to Congress are among hundreds of such non-terrorism cases pursued by federal authorities.

Publicly, of course, Attorney General John Ashcroft continues to speak almost exclusively of how Patriot Act powers are helping fight terrorism. In his nationwide tour this past fall to bolster support for the act (which has engendered growing discontent), Ashcroft lauded its "success" stories. However, his department also officially labels many cases as terrorism which aren't. A January 2003 study by the General Accounting Office concluded that, of those convictions classified as "international terrorism," fully 75 percent actually dealt with more common nonterrorist crimes.

Meanwhile, a new bill is quietly circulating on Capitol Hill to give even greater powers to law enforcement--in the name of fighting drug trafficking. The Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003--or Victory Act--could be introduced in Congress by February 2004. The text of the act was leaked to ABC News and appears to have been prepared by the office of Senator Orin Hatch (Republican, Utah), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This new act includes significant portions of the unpassed, so-called Patriot Act II, which faced broad opposition from conservatives and liberals alike.

And, according to the October 26, 2003, St. Petersburg Times, the Bush administration still isn't satisfied and has proposed changes that would "close the loopholes." For example, Bush wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without any court or grant jury review. He also wants to chip away at the right to bail. Current law already allows a judge to deny bond for anyone shown to be dangerous or a flight risk, but this isn't good enough for Bush. He is encouraging passage of the "Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003," a bill that would keep people accused of a whole range of new crimes behind bars pending trial by making those crimes "no bond" offenses. This would codify the concept already being used: locking people up first and investigating later. In the aftermath of 9/11, more than 750 immigrants were jailed for many months while the Justice Department looked into potential ties to terrorism--and in the end not one was charged with any crime.

Bush also wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to "domestic terrorism." Under the act, domestic terrorism is broadly defined as any criminal act intended to influence the government through "intimidation or coercion" involving "dangerous acts." Aggressive protestors of all stripes--from Greenpeace activists to abortion foes--could easily rail within this definition, opening the door for politically motivated executions. Bush also wants passage of the "Antiterrorism Tools Enhancement Act of 2003" (H.R. 3037) and the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003 (H.R. 3179). Both were proposed in the fall and are now in committee. They would give the FBI "administrative subpoena" authority to confiscate any records and compel any testimony on its authorization alone, thus eliminating court oversight entirely--or as Bush would call it, "interference."

Civil rights and liberties of ordinary U.S. citizens won't be respected. Indeed, should a certain chain of events occur, all one would have to do is donate some money to a group or organization to possibly be linked to terrorism. Consider the following scenario: you send a contribution to Greenpeace. The following week, Greenpeace activists non-violently blockade an oil tanker coming into New York harbor to protest the company's safety record; however, in the ensuing face-off, a tanker crewmember drowns trying to break the blockade. Under the proposed act's definition of domestic terrorism, a prosecutor could charge the Greenpeace protestors with terrorism--and they could face the death penalty. When the prosecutor subpoenas a list of Greenpeace donors, any one of them can be indicted for "material support" of "terrorism" and face a prison term if convicted. This could mean you. This isn't as farfetched as it sounds. Derived from an ACLU analysis, this is just one of many nightmare scenarios possible--and there are worse--if a recently revealed Justice Department draft of new anti-terrorism legislation becomes law.

Interestingly, according to the October 27, 2003, Long Island, New York, Newsday, the top White House aides who identified an American undercover agent may have committed an act of domestic terrorism as defined in the Patriot Act. Section 802 defines, in part, domestic terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. of any state that appear to be intended to intimidate of coerce a civilian population." Clearly, disclosing the identity of a CIA undercover agent is an act dangerous to life--the lives of the agent and her contacts abroad whom terrorist groups can now trace--and a violation of the criminal laws of the United States. The obvious intent of the White House in disclosing this classified information was to intimidate the agent's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had become a strong critic of Bush's Iraq policies. And by showing their willingness to make such a dangerous disclosure, officials sent a clear message to all critics that they, too, could be destroyed if they persist. The apparent intention "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" also meets the act's definition of domestic terrorism. This places the Justice Department investigators in a dilemma: will they treat this investigation differently from others? Under the act, they have acquired expanded powers to wiretap and search--but will they place sweeping and roving wiretaps on White House aides? Will they engage in secret searches of their offices, computers, and homes? Will they arrest and detain White House aides incommunica-do and without access to counsel?

Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Patriot Act--even putting aside these other impending restrictions on civil liberties--is how similar the act is to legislation enacted in the eighteenth century. The Alien and Sedition Acts are notorious in history for their abuse of basic civil liberties. For example, in 1798, the Alien Friends Act made it lawful for the president of the United States "to order all such aliens, as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof, to depart out of the territory of the United States." For years Americans have pointed to legislation like this as a travesty never to be repeated. Yet now it is back!

It seems unimaginable that any presidential administration would impose such brazen attacks as these on the civil liberties of a supposedly free people. Apparently, many Americans were initially so traumatized by 9/11 that they were ready to surrender their most treasured liberties. But pockets of resistance are developing and organizations forming. Three states and more than two hundred cities, counties, and towns around the country have passed resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. Many others are in progress. The language of these resolutions includes statements affirming a commitment to the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and directives to local law enforcement not to cooperate with federal agents involved in investigations deemed unconstitutional. A bill has also been introduced in the House to exclude bookstore and library records from the materials that could be subpoenaed by law enforcement without prior notification of the targeted person.

Some leading organizations, such as the ACLU and EFF, continue to keep the pressure on and are always worthy of support. American citizens who treasure their heritage of freedom should find at least one group to join and support--keeping in mind that the government may one day know the organizations they have checked out.

Barbara Dority is president of Humanists of Washington, executive director of the Washington Coalition Against Censorship, and cochair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force.