President Obama signs one-year extension of Patriot Act

Sunday was supposed to be a glorious holiday for fans of civil liberties.

The Patriot Act was set to expire today, but thanks to President Obama's signature, it now has a one-year extension.

There are three scary sections of the Patriot Act that will stay in place. From the AP, the extensions will:

• Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones.

• Allow court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

• Permit surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

All of the blame doesn't lie on the President, however, since the extension had already been passed in the Senate and by a 315 to 97 vote in the House.

In the past nine years, the Patriot Act has served as the excuse for many violations of civil liberties and privacy by the KGB FBI.

The FBI gained private information about American citizens from Internet providers, telecommunications companies, and health care providers without warrants, then later tried to cover up these crimes; the gutting of "time-honored surveillance laws;" and the occasional spying on libraries.

The Patriot Act, the evil son of President Clinton's Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty act of 1996, has given the federal government unprecedented power to monitor, spy on, and control the lives of everyday Americans all in the name of "keeping us safe" from big, bad terrorist-bogeymen that could strike at any time.

Since the likelihood of any of us being the victim of a terrorist attack is about one in 1.5 million, I am far more worried that a large and intrusive centralized government will strip away my liberties or commit acts of terrorism on American citizens (Waco? Ruby Ridge?).

When President Bush was in office, the Democrats screamed at howled at Bush's expansion of power, secrecy, and militarism. But now that President Obama is in office, this power, secrecy, and militarism has become bipartisan.*

*Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a great article about the horrible results of anything "bipartisan" in DC:

A mountain of evidence has emerged over the last several years documenting pervasive, systematic abuse of the Patriot Act powers.  The proposed safeguards were extremely modest and would have provided minimal oversight on how those powers were exercised.  Leading Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein spent all years ensuring that the proposed reforms were weakened to the point of virtual meaningless.  But as weakened as they were, "some Republican senators objected" and might have called Democrats "soft on terror," so that was the end of that.  The domestic surveillance law that Democrats spent years assailing as dangerously over broad when out of power is renewed in full now that they are in power.  That's the Beauty of Bipartisanship, and the last thing we need is more of it.

Bipartisan: nothing more than both wings of the same bird of prey.