Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

August 16, 2007

When Congress passed the so-called PATRIOT Act in 2001, much of the measure remained unread by the congressmen who voted for it. One element of the bill added literally minutes before the vote permits federal investigators to conduct ?sneak and peek? searches ? that is, searches permitted by secret warrants that are disclosed to the targeted individual long after the fact.

This is supposedly a tool to be used only when necessary to defend national security. Yet of the hundreds of sneak-and-peek searches conducted by the Feds in 2005, only 12 percent were related to terrorism. One covert search in eastern Tennessee was prompted by an investigation of a cockfighting ring. Cockfighting is a barbarous sport and corrupt gambling enterprise, to be sure, but hardly a threat to national security.

When police tactics devised to fight terrorists are employed against petty crooks, it's reasonable to expect that they will soon be deployed against law-abiding political dissidents. It has certainly happened before.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.