The PATRIOT ACT excretes on the fourth amendment. Simply, anyone doing anything "criminal" can be treated as a "terrorist" - sounds innocuous until you realize that speeding on the highway, on your way to work, is considered to be "criminal."

The Bush Administration Has Been Less Than Honest With the American People.
Take Ashcroft for Example:

Library responds to Ashcroft

FBI checks out library records of terrorist suspects

The Patriot Act Is Not About Terrorism,
It Is About Control of United States Citizens.

No mercy in Ashcroft's brand of justice
[Broken Link. Was: http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=8129&TagID=2-]

Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't have enough to do, hunting down terrorists. With the help of a rollover Congress, he now has a new and bigger club to go after federal judges who impose lighter sentences in criminal cases than he would like.

As a faithful lord high executioner of the administration's much touted "compassionate conservatism," Ashcroft wants to clamp down on those judges.

Target: 'Narco-Terror'
[Broken Link. Was: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WorldNewsTonight/victory_act030820.html]

ABCNEWS.com has obtained a draft of the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or VICTORY Act, which could be introduced to Congress this fall, and which appears to have been prepared by the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Provisions in the draft would:

Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."

Extend subpoena powers by giving giving law enforcement the authority to issue non-judicial subpoenas which require a person suspected of involvement in money laundering to turn over financial records and appear in a prosecutor's office to answer questions.

Extend the power of the attorney general to issue so-called administrative "sneak-and-peak" subpoenas to drug cases. These subpoenas allow law enforcement to gather evidence from wire communication, financial records or other sources before the subject of the search is notified.

Allow law enforcement to seek a court order to require the "provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service" or a financial institution to delay notifying a customer that their records had been subpoenaed.

"This bill would treat drug possession as a 'terrorist offense' and drug dealers as 'narco-terrorist kingpins,' " the aide argued. "To say that terrorist groups use a small percentage of the drug trafficking in the United States to finance terrorism may be a fair point, but this bill would allow the government to prosecute most drug cases as terrorism cases."

Concluded the aide: "It really seems to be more about a political agenda to jail drug users than a serious attempt to stop terrorists."

John Ashcroft's Patriot Act Summer Tour
http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=15519

by Mark Fiore (Flash format)

Ashcroft's Little Secret
[Broken Link. Was: http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8723]

Quite simply, Ashcroft's campaign and leadership PAC broke the law by giving and receiving a contribution that exceeded the federal contribution limit by at least 10 times and possibly by more than 200 times, and by failing to disclose the contribution in the first place.