home > newsroom Attorney General Ashcroft in Salt Lake City on Monday, August 25th Friends of the ACLU of Utah, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft will be in Salt Lake City, Monday morning, as part of a multi-city public relations "Roadshow" promoting the controversial USA PATRIOT Act. He will be giving a closed door speech to law enforcement and government officials at 10:50am in the Grand Ballroom of the Little America Hotel at 500 South Main Street. The public is not invited to the speech, but a loose ad-hoc coalition of over 9 organizations are planning a demonstration outside the hotel from 9:30am - 12pm. You are invited to join this demonstration opposing the Patriot Act and the proposed Patriot II and Victory Act. The demonstrators will be calling for governmental responsibility in protecting the civil liberties of all U.S. citizens saying we have the right to be "Safe and Free". Please bring your signs, creativity and good energy. The ACLU will provide legal observers to document the event and any possible violations of First Amendment rights. This does not mean that we will guarantee legal representation for any one who might choose to be arrested. For more information we have included excerpts from National ACLU press releases. American Civil Liberties Union Criticizes Attorney General's Plan to Bypass the Public during his PATRIOT Act Roadshow In response to the Justice Department’s launch of a multi-city public relations “roadshow” promoting the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the tour’s closure to the public, presumably intended to squelch protests, and questioned the agency’s use of public money to counter broad public concern about the expansive surveillance powers in the law. “An Attorney General going on the road, away from his official duties, to favorably spin policies violative of civil liberties is troubling, to say the least,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.“It raises two serious questions: is this tour -- which incidentally hits Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Idaho and Utah –- political in nature and how prudent is it to be spending public money on a ‘PATRIOT Act’ charm offensive?” The PATRIOT Act tour comes in the midst of rapidly growing public concern about portions of the 2001 law, which was passed with little debate shortly after the September 11 attacks. In recent months, the Department of Justice has been roundly criticized for this legislation and its questionable record on civil liberties in the post-9/11 era. Last month Republican Rep. C.L. “Butch” Otter (R-ID), from the conservative heartland, sponsored an amendment to a key spending bill prohibiting the implementation of a section of the law facilitating federal agents’ use of secret “sneak and peek” searches, which permit a delay in notification that a search was conducted. Also in Congress, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden recently introduced a bill to narrow other sections of the law, and Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) sponsored a bill to roll back Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which allows the FBI to access Americans’ library records without showing probable cause. On July 30, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, a provision that vastly expands the power of FBI agents to secretly obtain records and personal belongings of innocent people in the United States, including citizens and permanent residents. Several of the cities on Ashcroft’s itinerary have already joined in a national movement to pass local and regional resolutions calling for increased civil liberties protections, including Detroit and Ann Arbor. To date, 152 communities across the country have passed these resolutions, including three states: Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont. Significantly, the list of communities isn't’t exclusive to "liberal college towns," as DOJ officials charge. Resolution movements are cropping up everywhere from East Coast to West and from the Heartland to the South. One of the primary concerns with the tour, the ACLU said, is that it might be designed to prop up other politically ailing legislative initiatives, including the expansive sequel to the PATRIOT Act, known as PATRIOT II, or the new VICTORY Act, which contains four PATRIOT II provisions. Lawmakers and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum, including conservative mainstays like the American Conservative Union and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, oppose both pieces of legislation. The PATRIOT Act has come under increasing criticism, not only from the ACLU, but from Congress as well. Most recently, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 309 to 118 to repeal one of the more egregious parts of the USA Patriot Act -- the "sneak and peek" provision which allows law enforcement to search a home without telling the targeted individual. Americans are responding to the ever-growing list of examples of civil liberties abuses in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, including: The June DOJ Inspector General report detailing widespread and systematic abuses of the hundreds of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men detained in the weeks after 9/11. The report showed that, even though the men were found to have no connection whatsoever to the attacks on September 11, they were held for extreme amounts of time - in some cases for several months - under a quasi-official "no-bond, no-lawyers" policy. Although the Justice Department ’s response has been a pat "we did nothing illegal," it’s clear that most of the detainees were held on pretextual immigration violations such as an expired visa or incomplete paperwork. The proposed neighbor-spying-on-neighbor program called Operation TIPS, which would have recruited Americans whose jobs - such as cable repair persons and postal workers - grant them easy access to our homes as government informers, charged with reporting "suspicious activity" to a dedicated tips hotline. The plan to base the number of investigations in any given FBI jurisdiction on demographic criteria, including the number of mosques in the area. The initiative at the DOJ to force local and state police to enforce immigration laws, a plan opposed not only by immigrants’ advocates but also by law enforcement officials themselves. For more information please visit http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree.

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