by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
For the past four or five months, Paul Perez has gotten a lot of attention and fielded a barrage of questions across Florida’s Middle District about the USA Patriot Act.
He’s also heard plenty of criticism, fueled, he said, by “misunderstandings.”
As a result, he’s put together a 15-minute presentation about the Patriot Act, subtitled “Myth vs. Reality,” that he hopes will calm the fears many groups have about the federal government’s reach into the private lives of ordinary citizens.
As the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District, Perez and his staff are responsible for enforcing the Patriot Act in that region.
It requires a lot of time and just as much legwork. The district covers better than half the state, with offices from Jacksonville to Fort Myers and Naples. Nearly 10 million of Florida’s 17 million residents live in the Middle District.
The attacks of Sept. 11 brought about a “fundamental change in the way the Department of Justice does its business,” Perez told the Northeast Florida Paralegal Association, which met Thursday at the Omni.
He was a federal prosecutor at the time, and the essence of his job was to indict and prosecute those who had broken federal law “and put them away for as long as we could.”
Terrorism, however, operates “on a different scale,” he said.
“As we all now know, tragically, the offenders that hijacked those planes couldn’t care less about deterrence,” Perez continued. “They paid the ultimate price by slamming those planes into those towers.
“What we do now is not so much go after terrorists to prosecute them and put them in jail for a long time but to prevent terrorism before it happens.”
The blueprint for preventing terrorism is in the 157 sections of the USA (United and Strengthening America) Patriot Act. Those sections are in 10 chapters, covering such topics as enhanced domestic security, enhanced surveillance procedures, international money laundering, protecting the border and removing obstacles to investigating terrorism.
Most of the controversial sections are found in Chapter Two, “Enhanced Surveillance Procedures.”
“Myth number one” about the Patriot Act, Perez said, is it “permits the indefinite suspension of immigrants on minor visa violations.”
In fact, he said, the review process for detentions “must be based on reasonable grounds that the alien will commit an act of terror.”
Continued detention is permitted only if the alien “presents a threat to the national security.” A review process is held every six months and is “always reviewable” by habeas corpus.
The second myth is that thousands of people were rounded up and detained for long periods without criminal charges being filed.
A total of 750 foreign nationals were detained, and 500 were subsequently deported, Perez said.
Myth three is that the act “presents a danger to Constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.”
“In fact,” said Perez, “terrorists and spies have used libraries to plan and carry out activities that threaten our national security for years. Ordinary grand juries have issued subpoenas to all manner of businesses, including libraries and book stores, for records relevant to criminal inquiries.”
The most prominent of those cases, he added, involved the hunt for the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; Gianni Versace’s murder investigation; and the search for the New York Zodiac killer, who allegedly took his name from the murderer who killed 37 in the San Francisco area.
The FBI cannot examine those records without a court order and can’t use the Patriot Act to investigate ordinary crimes or even domestic terrorism, he said.
The final myth is that the Patriot Act contains “sneak and peek” provisions that would allow the government to search private property without notifying the owner.
“It doesn’t provide for an absence of notice, but for delayed notice,” Perez said. “That is a longstanding crime-fighting tool that has been upheld by the courts in organized crime, drug and child pornography cases.
“What the Patriot Act did was basically codify the existing case law and now allows them in terrorism investigations.”