This statement is patently untrue. While it has been difficult to get a complete accounting of the Patriot Act’s misuse (largely due to the Department’s own unwillingness to provide the public with the most basic information about how the Act is being used), the American Civil Liberties Union has extensively catalogued a number of abuses .
From ACLU: According to reports, the Patriot Act has been used to:
- Secretly search the home of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim attorney whom the government wrongly suspected, accused and detained as a perpetrator of the recent train bombing in Madrid.
- Charge, detain, and prosecute a Muslim student in Idaho, Sami al-Hussayen, for providing "material support" to terrorists because he posted to an Internet website links to objectionable materials, even though such links were available on the websites of a major news outlet and of the government’s own expert witness in the case.
- Serve a National Security Letter (NSL) on an Internet Service Provider (ISP) so coercive under the provisions of the NSL statue that a federal court struck down the entire statute - as vastly expanded by the Patriot Act - used to obtain information about e-mail activity and web surfing for intelligence investigations.
- Gag that ISP from disclosing this abuse to the public, and gag the ACLU itself, which represents the ISP, from disclosing this abuse to the public when ACLU became aware of it, and from disclosing important circumstances relating to this abuse and other possible abuses of the gag, even to this very day.
- Investigate and prosecute crimes that are not terrorism offenses, even though it cited terrorism prevention as the reason Congress should enact the law, and cites terrorism prevention as the reason why it cannot be changed.
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