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Originally Posted by myboynoah
A libertarian looking to socialists for salvation. Interesting.
From time to time I hear about Bush's assault on civil rights, so I'm curious about the details of how that is affecting the day to day lives of Americans.
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Mr. Noah,
I don't know that most Americans are affected directly by the PATRIOT act. I don't think we're all being wiretapped or monitored by satellite surveillance. (Of course we wouldn't know if we were.)
But the PATRIOT act has made enormous work for libraries. One of the provisions is that library records can be seized at any time, and librarians are not allowed to disclose whether the feds have or have not seized records. Librarians tend to zealously guard the privacy of their users, so the result has been an industry-wide effort to change policy and procedure to protect the user. This has meant an increase in work and expense.
It's hard to explain this in such a way that any normal person would care, but the point is that yes, for some Americans day-to-day life has changed.
(end rant.)
Next topic:
Most Americans are probably not affected much, but I've had coworkers (American citizens) whose lives have become made more difficult due to the fact that they have Muslim names, and the PATRIOT act allows for profiling.