Get Ready for PATRIOT II

The "fog of war" obscures more than just news from the battlefield. 
It also provides cover for radical domestic legislation, especially 
ill-considered liberty-for-security swaps, which have been 
historically popular at the onset of major conflicts. The last time 
allied bombs fell over a foreign capital, the Bush Administration 
rammed through the USA PATRIOT Act, a clever acronym for maximum 
with-us-or-against-us leverage (the full name is "Uniting and 
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to 
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"). Remarkably, this 342-page law was 
written, passed (by a 98-1 vote in the U.S. Senate) and signed into 
law within seven weeks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. As a result, 
the government gained new power to wiretap phones, confiscate 
property of suspected terrorists, spy on its own citizens without 
judicial review, conduct secret searches, snoop on the reading habits 
of library users, and so General John Ashcroft wants to finish the 
job. On Jan. 10, 2003, he sent around a draft of PATRIOT II; this 
time, called "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003." The 
more than 100 new provisions, Justice Department spokesperson Mark 
Corallo told the Village Voice recently, "will be filling in the 
holes" of PATRIOT I, "refining things that will enable us to do our 
job." Though Ashcroft and his mouthpieces have issued repeated 
denials that the draft represents anything like a finished proposal, 
the Voice reported that: "Corallo confirmed ... that such measures 
were coming soon."

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15541