We all know and loathe the PATRIOT Act (unless you’re a statist in which case feel free to sodomize yourself with a retractable baton) but it seems things may be even worse than we realized. Senator Wyden or Oregon is claiming that a secret PATRIOT Act exists:
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
I think this news should put to bed any concept of the United States being a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It appears as though our “representatives” are just fine making up secret laws now.