What "basic human rights" does the PATRIOT Act impinge?
It's been a decade, and I don't see the "there" there. The PATRIOT Act was supposed to be the end of the republic, but so far it seems to have had no impact in practice.
It seems to have had no impact in practice because you haven't been told whether your communications are being monitored, who is monitoring them, or what conclusions they are drawing.
Until there is a publicized abuse of this information - like happened with Watergate - people will not be made aware of how much our political system has been impacted. Of course the people who would like to abuse it are perfectly aware of this, and very conveniently the PATRIOT act has lots of safeguards built in to help them avoid public discussion of their actions.
In this light I find it very concerning that the NSA has argued - with a straight face - that it would violate the right to privacy of Americans for Americans to be told how many are currently being monitored.
The lack of judicial oversight for the executive branch's data gathering powers granted by the Act evaporates any circumstances in which the First Amendment could reasonably and effectively be used for unpopular speech or unpopular assembly.
The banking regulation amendments effectively prohibit large scale anonymous or unpopular publishing and communication/organization of effective resistance.
A shining example presently is the harassment of the social networks of Wikileaks associates and supporters. Another is the collection and use of Twitter and GSM metadata of protesters in New York.
The next time something like COINTELPRO happens, it won't have a wikipedia page for it, and those attempting to draw attention to it will be jailed indefinitely without trial.
Note that this is the same FBI that targeted Martin Luther King - but now with no sunlight. If you don't see the real, live implications of this sort of tyranny, you aren't paying attention.
The government issues over 40,000 NSLs a year, now.
What the FBI did with Martin Luther King came to light years later. Meanwhile, we're seeing their moves with regards to organizations like WikiLeaks in real time. There is far more sunlight today than there was.
National Security Letters are also wildly overblown. They are a formalization of things the FBI was already doing. With that formalization has come increased judicial oversight: the PATRIOT Act Reauthorization in 2006 gave recipients subject to the gag order recourse in court.
You think if the FBI circa 1950 wanted information from you, you'd be able to go complain to a federal court?
It's been a decade, and I don't see the "there" there. The PATRIOT Act was supposed to be the end of the republic, but so far it seems to have had no impact in practice.