9/11: The day freedom was planned to die? Biden wrote Patriot Act draft in 1994

On October 26, 2001, just 45 days following the events of 9/11, then Republican President George Bush signed the Patriot Act into law. 

Patriotic violation of the Constitution?

The groundbreaking act provided for warrantless surveillance and searches of property, calls, messages and business records of American citizens in direct contravention of the Bill of Rights.

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. [Emphasis added].

Biden wrote it before 9/11?

Having been written and passed by both houses of Congress at an astonishing pace, one might wonder whether a draft of the legislation predates the tragedy of 9/11. One need not rely on conjecture, though. Joe Biden revealed, in testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2002, that he in fact authored the main parts of the act half a decade before it passed:

[Y]ou can ask the attorney general this because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, "Joe, I'm introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.” . . . [B]ut just to set the record straight; almost the same thing that got passed, the Patriot Act, was introduced by me in 1994 and it was the right wing that defeated it. You guys tried to help get it passed, including the wiretap changes and the rest.  [Emphasis added].

Worse than it sounds?

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), which opposed the Patriot Act even before it was passed, explained that the legislation turned out to be even more of an encroachment on the Fourth Amendment than they imagined and that it was approved by senators who did not read it:

The day before the Patriot Act passed in October 2001, Center for Democracy & Technology founder Jerry Berman warned, “This bill has been called a compromise, but the only thing compromised is our civil liberties.” 

. . .

[F]ormer U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, the lone “no” vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act, and Laura Murphy, who managed the ACLU’s Legislative Office in Washington, D.C. at the time of the bill’s passage . . . reflected on the speed with which the bill moved through Congress, despite containing “an old wishlist of the FBI . . . because they knew it was going to pass.” Feingold remarked that many other members of the Senate admitted that they never read or even gained a basic understanding of what was in the Patriot Act. But their review, said Murphy, revealed that “some of the authorities went far beyond anything we could have imagined." [Emphases added].

The CDT detailed those new “authorities," including the “top secret" origins of some of the surveillance:

The Patriot Act expanded the ability of government to obtain a broad range of business records without a warrant, and to issue National Security Letters or administrative subpoenas — and for both of these authorities, it removed the requirement that the government show that the information related to a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. 

Section 702, a program that allows warrantless collection of the content of communications, had its origins in the top secret Stellar Wind program conducted under a claim of inherent presidential power and was then codified by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, also remains problematic: among other issues, once the government has collected information, current rules allow it to search that data for information about specific Americans without a warrant or court review. [Emphases added].

In fact, new agencies like the TSA and DHS, were created to check and spy on citizens, often patriotic Americans, to enforce the Orwellian named Patriot Act.

Snowden turns the tide

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shocked the world in June, 2013, with his release, from overseas, of hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the shocking extent of the US government's surveillance of its citizenry, as summarized by the BBC:

6 June 2013: Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald reports the US National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers under a top secret court order granting the government unlimited authority to obtain communications data for a three-month period.

7 June: The Guardian and Washington Post report the NSA is accessing the systems of US internet giants including Google and Facebook, and collecting data under a previously undisclosed surveillance programme called Prism. The programme allows officials to collect material including emails, live chats and search histories. [Emphases added].

Snowden also took on the government's claim that only criminals need Fourth Amendment protections:

People who say they don’t care about privacy because they have got nothing to hide have not really thought too deeply about these issues, because what they are really saying is, “I do not care about this right.” When you say, “I don’t care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide,” that is no different than saying, “I don’t care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say” or “freedom of the press because I have nothing to write.”

In great part due to public resistance that built up following Snowden's revelations, Republican Senator Rand Paul successfully blocked the renewal of the Patriot Act on June 1, 2015, the day of its expiration, with the assistance of two Democrat senators. Rand, though, was well aware that the government would not give up, expressly warning that the victory "might be short lived," in a statement after the Senate recessed that day: “Tonight, we stopped the illegal NSA bulk-data collection. . . . This is a victory no matter how you look at it. It might be short lived.”

A rose by any other name

The block on the NSA's collection of Americans’ phone call records, in bulk, and other spying on citizens, was indeed short lived, as senators came back the very next day, June 2, 2015, to pass the USA Freedom Act, which reinstated major surveillance authorities that lapsed with the expiration of the Patriot Act the day before.

The reinstated powers included surveillance of so-called "lone wolves," people the government claims to are planning terrorism despite their failure to join or even link up with any terrorist groups, “roving wiretaps” where new phone numbers can be tapped with a warrant for a different number, and continued mass data collection.

Trump blocks

After attempts to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act failed, the surveillance law expired on March 15, 2020, and attempts to renew it were blocked by President Donald Trump:

But with President Donald Trump suddenly opposing the renewal bill and encouraging Republicans to oppose it, there were not enough votes to pass the legislation to restore warrantless access that began under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

While the provisions of the Patriot Act and USA Freedom Act have now expired, it is not known how much of the mass surveillance revealed by Snowden secretly persists.

Never waste a crisis or never waste a chance to create a crisis?

While the passage of the Patriot Act led to charges that the government exploited the 9/11 crisis in order to pass the surveillance laws that Biden had already drafted, being sure not to “waste” the crisis in the language of Winston Churchill, others, like Greg Reese, claim that the crisis itself was created by government actors and not just exploited.

We asked one such 9/11 activist, Rabbi Yehoishophot Oliver, what the impetus is to discuss government involvement in the tragedy more than two decades later. Here is his unedited response. 

Several years before COVID, I stumbled across the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. After examining the arguments for this position carefully— especially the content from Architect and Engineers for 9/11 Truth refuting as physically impossible the official story of how the buildings collapsed—I concluded that the claim was certainly true. 

I further realized that this awareness was key to understanding all modern governments. Because if the supposed bastion of freedom could commit such a heinous atrocity and such a daring deception against its own citizens and the entire world, then so could other governments (many of whom were also complicit in the coverup). 

Moreover, it was clear this was surely not the first time that they committed such mass deception, nor would it be the last. If anything, I reasoned, since the deception of 9/11 was largely successful and the perpetrators got off scot-free, the next mass deception would be even greater. 

But someone aware of the truth of 9/11 would be armed with powerful skepticism toward the government that would protect them from manipulation the next time around. Indeed, on the whole, 9/11 "truthers" were also COVID skeptics who refused to comply with alleged COVID measures and refused to take the poison shots.