Colleen Connell, a longtime litigator and
executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of
Illinois, came to Springfield last week to in effect prosecute the
Bush administration for using the U.S.A. Patriot Act to take away
Americans’ constitutional freedoms.
“The administration has not met yet its
burden of showing how it is that the Patriot Act has made us safer
such that we should continue to tolerate the incursions on civil
liberties,” Connell told the lunchtime crowd Wednesday, July
13, at the Hoogland Center for the Arts.
An example of these incursions, Connell said,
was law-enforcement officials’ use, and abuse, of NSLs
— national-security letters — to demand private
information on citizens. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a
law-enforcement official may show up at a public library with an
NSL and demand a patron’s Internet or lending records.
Unless Congress intervenes, section 215 and
other controversial parts of the Patriot Act are set to expire on
Dec. 31.
Though the event wasn’t billed as a
public debate, Connell ended up defending her claims to assistant
U.S. Attorney Pat Chesley, an audience member who was eager to
contest every point in the ACLU director’s case against the
Patriot Act.
“Every conversation I’ve had
with the ACLU, they want to talk about everything but the Patriot
Act,” Chesley later told Illinois
Times. “NSLs are not related to
the Patriot Act.”
“ ‘Sneak and peek’ warrants
existed before the Patriot Act,” Chesley says. Investigators
have the duty and the right to gather information, he says, but
must try to strike a balance between collecting the data needed to
perform an investigation and the duty of government to
protect citizens.
The ACLU would love nothing more than to see
these provisions of the Patriot Act disappear. Failing that, the
civil-liberties organization is backing an alternative, the
Security and Freedom Ensured Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation
co-authored by U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Larry Craig,
R-Idaho.
Connell told the Center for the Arts audience
that the SAFE Act would add congressional and judicial oversight
that the Patriot Act lacks to domestic intelligence-gathering
activities of law-enforcement agencies.
“As a practicing lawyer, I’m
really hard pressed to identify why this notion of judicial review,
which is an important part of the constitutional system of checks
and balances, is so offensive to this administration, because the
federal courts have been very, very reliable allies in law
enforcement in general and the war on terror in particular,”
Connell said.
Chesley, who says he attended the meeting of
his own volition, objected to the ACLU’s premise:
“You make it sound like there’s
no oversight at all with a 215. Specifically, every six months Congress reviews every 215 order that’s
issued and checks it out, and they’ve been doing that ever since
the Patriot Act was enacted. They haven’t come back to the
Department of Justice and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing it
wrong.’ ”
Connell countered: “The point of this
is not to say that all law enforcement is bad because, clearly,
it’s not. We all want to be safe.”
She continued: “We all care about the
law being enforced. In fact, I would be so bold as to submit that
the one thing that might tie us all together as Americans, given
our incredibly rich and diverse ethnic, religious, and racial
backgrounds, is our joint commitment and allegiance to the
Constitution and the rule of law.
“And when government breaks that rule
of law, that completely unravels the threads of civil society and
our social contract with each other and the government.”
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2005.
