Welcome to the new America – please check your civil liberties at the door.

At least that’s the message Congress and the President George W. Bush sent when the U.S. Patriot Act, also known as the “Uniting and Strengthening America Act,” passed by the Senate 98 to 1 and signed into law last week.

One of the most evident problems in this sweeping package of anti-terrorism measures was its hasty inception. Instead of receiving thorough debate and consideration in the Senate, it was literally rushed through, to the point where some senators didn’t even have a final copy of what they were voting on.

Does anyone else think this is an incredibly bad way to govern?

As any student with a penchant for procrastination knows, rushing projects at the midnight hour rarely leads to a quality product, exactly the problem with the “Patriot Act.”

One of the most disturbing provisions in the act is a vast expansion of federal wiretapping powers, circumventing the stringent protections given to ordinary citizens by the Fourth Amendment. Within the Patriot Act, the FBI is authorized to use wiretaps not only on “reasonable cause” (a search warrant), but simply on “cause.” Further is their expanded ability to tap multiple phones on a single warrant, a policy ripe for abuse.

Some claim that if one is a “law-abiding citizen,” one should have nothing to fear from these vast encroachments into privacy. Yet this reasoning is based upon the fallacious grounds that we have no protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The logic of this argument is almost a direct invitation to an Orwellian “Big Brother” State – after all, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to fear from the police checking your house or phone calls out, right?

Wrong.

This is a vast shift from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt – or rather, the shift from a free democratic state to a Stalinist police state.

Yet others have invoked the massive support of both the Congress and public for these anti-terrorism measures as just cause for ripping apart the Constitution. The public is rarely in and of itself a good indication of sound policy. If it were, shouldn’t Joseph McCarthy’s house committee on “Un-American” activities have been lauded as national heroes? What about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II? This enjoyed popular support. Does that make it sound policy?

Even more abuses are down the line in the “Patriot Act,” such as the ability to hold legal immigrants in detention for up to seven days without being charged with a crime on the mere suspicion of being involved with terror. Not evidence, but the conjecture of involvement.

Not illegal immigrants either – this involves legal residents of the United States.

If we are willing to forfeit Constitutional processes for individuals legally living in our country who simply have yet to become naturalized citizens, what hope does that leave for the rest of us?

How long will it be until the next terror attack provokes Congress to pass a law extending such provisions to citizens – all with the same “popular support?”

This so-called “mandate” is being used as a Judas goat, leading our civil liberties to the slaughtering pen. Americans should be wary of federal intrusions into civil liberties in the name of safety, especially when said intrusions have a history of failure.

Take wiretapping. In 1998, after the embassy bombings in Africa, Congress authorized “roving wiretaps” similar to the ones made simpler to obtain in the Patriot Act. Yet clearly this had a negligible effect upon the FBI’s ability to apprehend the Sept. 11 terrorists before they struck.

As for detaining immigrants, look back only to the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing, when Congress passed the “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.” This law allowed for courts to use secret evidence in order to deport foreigners suspected of terror. (By the way, if you don’t recall, the Oklahoma City bomber was a white, American-born citizen).

This too failed to prevent in any fashion the horrendous attacks of Sept. 11. Rather it only paved the way for further erosion of our rights protected under the Constitution.

Sacrificing our precious civil liberties and destroying the Constitution to fight “those who hate our liberties and way of life” is a pyrrhic victory at its best. Using the logic employed by the authors of the Patriot Act, we must give up our liberties in order to save them.

Orwell had a term for this kind of reasoning – doublethink.

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Fla.