Civil Liberties

By Mark W. Stroberg

We should repeal the USA/Patriot Act and restore full civil liberties to the American people.

The most egregious provisions of this law are "sneak and peek," where police would have the legal authority to break into your house, and, for instance, copy the contents of your computer's hard drive and never inform you that your privacy had been violated. Other provisions include weakened legal requirements for obtaining wiretap authority.

Police and prosecutors complain that law enforcement is "difficult" with the various Constitutional protections in place for those accused of crimes. So what? Law enforcement is supposed to be difficult. Societies in which it is easy are known as Police States.

Political conservatives and other authoritarians try to convince us that there is a tradeoff between individual liberty and civil order, that in order to have one we must relinquish the other. I do not accept the validity of that concept. Both individual liberty and civil order are based on the same principle, the libertarian principle of nonagression. The more political and civil liberty a society has, the more spontaneous order and structure it has. The less political and civil liberty a society enjoys, the more chaos and violence it must endure. Also (and this is lost on the budding totalitarians in Congress), the less centralized and more dispersed a society's politicoeconomic power is, the better it is able to adapt to and protect itself against acts of terrorism.

If elected, my first efforts as a U.S. Representative will be directed toward repealing the USA PATRIOT Act and other unconstitutional legislation that the current Congress chooses to pass. In every bill I sponsor or support, I will uphold the civil liberties protections in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.