By Brian Bohl
Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst, Andrew Napolitano, presented a lecture on the dangers of exchanging safety for security to a large crowd on Wednesday. He discussed a wide range of legal issues including the Patriot Act, searches of personal property and how civil liberties have suffered in the name of homeland security.
“The Patriot Act is the most abdominal, unconstitutional assault on human rights since the government enacted the Alien and Sedition act of 1798,” Napolitano, the youngest life-tenured judge in New Jersey, said.
The Patriot Act contains the provision that federal agents can sign their own search warrants without going through the usual steps of taking it to an independent judge or the burden of proof of showing probable cause of a crime to necessitate a search.
Napolitano also derided the Patriot Act for the clause that makes it a crime to tell anyone if a person has been the target or the victim of a self written search warrant.
“Ordinary legislation enacted by Congress purported to throw out the guarantee of the fourth amendment,” Napolitano said.
The thesis of the lecture focused on the wisdom of exchanging personal liberties for security and potential pitfalls that might result from choosing the later.
“Giving away some of your freedoms for safety is a bargain from the devil,” Napolitano said. “Giving up the freedoms to the government has never worked.”
Citing recent historical evidence to support his premise, Napolitano pointed to the 110,000 Japanese-Americans who were confined and not given access to lawyers or charged with crimes during World War II. That lack of respect for human rights has carried over into the twenty first century. So far, the federal government has currently increased over 760 Arab-Americans and tried them in secret.
The Patriot Act’s sweeping powers have so far garnered little tangible results in fighting terrorism. Compounding the problems of the act was the fact that many legislators were not even allowed to read the full provisions before it was passed at 3 a.m. in September 2001.
“I think many great points were raised about how specifically the federal government takes advantage of our rights during wartime,” senior John Batanchiev, audio and radio major, said. “I did not now that Congress was not allowed to read the act before passing it.”
The American people should not just be resigned to fact that the government has unprecedented power to infringe of individual rights. Through protests and voting, politicians will be forced to give back some of the civil liberties that have been taken away the past few years, Napolitano said.
“We should vote out of office those who do not take their oath to uphold the Constitution seriously,” he said in is his closing remarks. ” The Constitution must be upheld.”
Andrew Napolitano discussed with students how civil liberties have been affected during wartime. (Brian Bohl/The Chronicle)