Abuses of Power, part (n)

From the 'Duh' department: US Department of Justice's report on deferred warrant requests for 2008 is out, and can you believe the PATRIOT Act was used to advance the (domestic) Culture wars, instead of combat the Islamist threat? Pardon me while I feign shock; just make sure to clear a spot on the ground, in case I actually fall over while attempting to feel faint. HuffPo ran a story about 1200-1300 warrants being granted under this PATRIOT Act provision, with 5 of them being terrorism related. Fortunately, HuffPo was generous enough to host (and link to) the actual report, so it's possible to see past the writer's bias. 763 warrants were requested in 2008. The remainder were extensions for existing warrants (including these), so the 1200 number is bullshit. That being said... 474 (62%) of these were for drug investigations. 53 (7%) were for fraud investigations. 39 (5%) were for weapons investigations. 23 (3%) of these were given no reason at all. 23 requests were modified by the granting judge (not necessarily to add reasons to the warrant requests). 3 requests were denied. The above three categories were the most frequent reasons given for a warrant request, with the remaining 26% pertaining to a scattering of federal crimes. 30-90 days are by far the most frequent delayed notification periods, with 90 days being the most-used with the warrants and extensions. No mention of interrelation was given in the report; e.g. "how many non-drug warrants were tied to drug cases, and vice-versa." I suspect that when they're lumped together, the rate of misuse is much higher.

posted at: 15:27 | permanent link to this entry

Today's topic for discussion is:

Five shall be the number of the counting; the number of the counting shall be five.

posted at: 15:23 | permanent link to this entry