Repeal the Patriot Act
I have been writing for years about the dangers to human freedom that come from government mass surveillance. The United States was born in a defiant reaction to government surveillance. In the decade preceding the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the villains were the Stamp Act and the Writs of Assistance Act. Today, the villain is the Patriot Act.
Here is the backstory.
In 1765, when the British government was looking for creative ways to tax the colonists, Parliament enacted the Stamp Act. That law required all persons in the colonies to purchase stamps from a British government vendor and to affix them to all documents in one’s possession. These were not stamps as we use today, rather they bore the seal of the British government. The vendor would apply ink to the seal and for a fee – a tax – impress an image of the seal onto documents.
All documents in one’s possession – financial, legal, letters, books, newspapers, pamphlets, even posters destined to be nailed to trees – required the government stamps.
How did the British government, 3,000 miles away, know if one had its stamps on one’s documents? Answer: The Writs of Assistance Act. A writ of assistance was a general warrant issued by a secret court in London. A general warrant does not specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized. It merely authorized the bearer – a civilian or military government official – to search where he wished and seize whatever he found.
The use of writs of assistance ostensibly to search colonial homes for stamps produced an avalanche of opposition that often turned to violence against the stamp vendors. The sheer cost of invading private homes fueled fears that the true purpose of the tax was not to generate revenue – though the king always needed cash – rather, it was to remind the colonists that the king was sovereign and his agents and soldiers could enter colonial homes on a whim.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but it had caused lasting harm to the king. Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn has estimated that by the late 1760s, one-third of the colonists favored secession from Great Britain, either peaceful or violent.
In 1789, six years after the American Revolution was won, the 13 colonies that had seceded combined into the United States of America under the Constitution. Two years later, the Bill of Rights was ratified, the Fourth Amendment of which was expressly written to prohibit general warrants – to assure that the new government would not and could not do to Americans what the British government had done to the colonists.
That assurance was manifested in the amendment’s requirements that only judges can issue search warrants, which must be based on probable cause of crime and which must specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized.
https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2020/03/04/repeal-the-patriot-act/