“In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes.”
…
“‘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,’ said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. ‘They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens.'”
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“Some of the restrictions on government surveillance that were erased by the Patriot Act had been enacted after past abuses — including efforts by the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the Cold War. Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it isn’t far fetched to believe that the government might overstep its bounds again.
“‘I don’t think that those are frivolous fears,’ Lynch said. ‘We’ve already heard stories of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the (Iraq) war … The government is constantly trying to expand its jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely.'”
