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Patriot Act Arrest Claim Not all it Seems

As much as I think the Patriot Act is a oxymoronicaly named corrosion of our freedoms, the hysteria over the story of the North Carolina teen supposedly held under the act without legal counsel is proving to be untrue.

FBI agents investigating a February 15 bomb hoax that evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University traced the phone call to the juvenile’s Oxford, North Carolina home. They served his mother with a search warrant and arrested the teen. He does have an attorney and will get his day in court.

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Blogs and talk radio on the left and right have been howling over the original rumor, but strangely quiet now that the story is proving to be over hyped fear mongering. These so called news sources play to the popular conspiratorial viewpoint, people eat up claims of big bad evil men taking away your rights but suddenly become deaf to the real story.

This is one of those stories that when I first heard it set off my bullshit detector. It didn’t sound right, and sure enough the truth is far less ominous than the ballyhoo.

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