Shapiro is a nice man, career prosecutor -- at least 30 years in the biz -- excellent lawyer, very smart. He used to work with my present boss when my boss had his job 20 years ago. Shapiro knows the act better than I do -- works with it, of course -- and caught me in a few misstatements of the law. But his own "defense" largely consisted in ignoring my criticisms about the menace to political dissent, the lowered standards for searches and wiretaps, and the like, or redescribing these by saying that he liked them because they make his work easier.
Thus his opening presentation was devoted to saying that he liked the provision that enabled him to get a warrant for a search or wiretap on the showing of "a significant purpose" of the investigation being foreign intelligence, rather than "the purpose." He didn't mention that he doesn't need a probable cause showing anymore under the act. I pointed out that in a free society, making the life of a prosecutor easier was not a recommendation.
He also admitted that the law would be adapted by prosecutors to uses in ordinary criminal investigations, just as the mail fraud and RICO statutes have been put to work way beyond their original intentions. He poo-pooed worries about political repression, saying that I hadn't pointed to any under ther Patriot Act -- this was untrue, actually, but we probably have different ideas of what counts as political repression. I said that the restriction on liberty had not been warranted by any success in capturing terrorists. He said rather lamely (to my mind) that criminal investigations take time to develop.
Shapiro complained that Patriot Act-hating is a sort of metaphor for people who hate Bush and Ashcroft. I said that I didn't like Clinton and Reno either. And he said that prosecutors had most of the Patriot Act powers before, and that if we didn't like those powers we should be worried about his power to order grand jury subpoenas. So I agreed, we should.
The synagogue (a humanist atheist schul) was probably a harder audience for him than for me. Still, I thought that his defense of the Act was fairly weak. It was fun debating him.
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