Jason Judd - Immediately Verifiable: Essays Regarding Censorship

Immediately Verifiable:

Essays Regarding Censorship

A Study While At University

By

Jason Judd

The USA Patriot Act: A Moral Panic

Jason Judd

July 25, 2012

Madonna University

2012 by Jason Judd

Berkley, Michigan

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Third Printing First Edition 2020

This book is the work of Jason Judd as was written in part while studying censorship in the MALS program at Madonna University, Livonia, Michigan. I offer great thanks to all of those who might appear in these essays, and also thanks to all of those people encountered along the way while this information made its rounds. This book has had the text and any content intentionally left unedited by others at the authors request.

T he USA Patriot Act: A Moral Panic

It will ultimately be seen that censorship is defined as the exercise of determining the behavior of any people by controlling the information thats available to them. The media, what we read, what we see, what we sayit all has some influence on the behavior of people as social beings. We, unfortunately, form our prejudices and assumptions because of information that were fed from others. The spread of information determines the focus of a group, i.e. where that group is going, how it behaves, and therefore what it believes to be socially acceptable righteous, true, and virtuous . Societies form around the information thats available to their people. They form around the control and the accepted interpretations of that information as it is passed among those people. So, assuming that the preceding definition and statements have some validity, there is little reason to wonder why the federal government felt the need to control, in various ways, the means of communication in America shortly after the events of 9/11 with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. There was a loss of control of the infrastructure and institutions within the borders of America, and the people, as well as the government, were all caught by surprise. Did the authorities need to subdue some ensuing panic? Was our governments plan, when drafting the Act, to take advantage of some tragic situation in order to exercise powers that had previously been denied them by the Bill of Rights? Or, did they really need to facilitate some means of communication between law enforcement agencies and first responders in the case of further terrorist attacks? Either way, the government, and the American people, were gripped with fear and felt a need to unite, somehow, in order to feel secure within their selves, within this society that weve formed.

In evaluating the validity of the Patriot Act, recent incidents in Detroit can shed light on the claims by our government that the USA Patriot Act has become necessary in order to secure communications for the safety of the people, made to question their security. In recent weeks, a bomb threat was called into the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. That threat caused the tunnel to be shut down for about four hours, and much of Wayne County, Michigan went into lockdown while Detroit and Windsor police collaborated on the efforts to search the tunnel. Helicopters from the FBI flew overhead, and the NSA searched through electronic records. Police cars swarmed around the border as dogs sniffed through the tunnel. Security at the remaining gateways between America and Canada came to standstill. And even though an old pickup truck was hauled out of the tunnel on a flatbed wrecker, their efforts turned up nothing. They all responded, and the agencies communicated with one another quite well, Im sure. But there was no bomb found. There was nothing but media hype, and pictures of helicopters and police cruisers, and news of a lockdown at the border. Like most bomb threats, a panic was created, no bomb ever turned up, and it seems now that such hysteria is even facilitated, while appearing much like a well-rehearsed dance, by the USA Patriot Act. A few days later, another threat was called in regarding the Ambassador Bridge which stretches over the Detroit River, connecting Detroit and Windsor. Again, the ballet of authorities followed. Then again, just a day or two later, a final threat was called into 9-1-1 during a Detroit Tigers game, as the caller claimed that there was a bomb in the crowded Comerica Park where a game was being played. On the third instance nothing was even done. The people inside the stadium were not notified, the stadium was not evacuated, the media was fairly hushed regarding the entire incident, and on the following day hardly anyone around the city of Detroit even knew of the incident. In hindsight, theyve never even caught any of the people who called in any of the threats. You have to wonder, while living under the government surveillance of the USA Patriot Act, which was drafted as legislation in order to secure communications to protect us from fear, terrorism, and domestic panic, how does someone call a bomb threat into 9-1-1 and target a crowded a Comerica Park, without the authorities being able to find out who is responsible for making the call?

In the modern day, most researchers can agree on the definition, causes, effects, and implications of a moral panic, aside from terrorism. And though moral panics in America stretch back as far as the witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, they have progressed through the persecution of Catholics in the nineteenth century, the McCarthy Era with the onset of television and the Cold War, and even the hunting down of innocent people professed to be child abducting Satan worshippers during the 1990s, to name just a few incidents. The First Amendment, it could be argued, grants the people of America the right to be dissident, and the establishment in America, which conforms to tradition and norms, as people always do, therefore panics with the spread of news that their institutions and establishment have been threatened. The events following 9/11 have all the elements of a moral panic, and legislation created by the USA Patriot Act during that time, is just a symptom of such a thing. The Act itself, with all good intentions, could have been drafted simply in order to control the media and the communications in order to prevent some irrational social behavior that would ultimately result in the disorganized and violent breakdown of the establishment and other institutions within this country. The revised Patriot Act that was passed in the subsequent years (2005), an Act that was referred to as Patriot Act 2 for quite some time, the USA Patriot Act that is still in effect, intended to focus the efforts of authorities on the social behavior in America that could eventually fall into the patterns of some type of panic, or riot behavior, and it focused that behavior into some organized and justifiable nationalist mood that could not be challenged either from within or from without the culture of America. The Act solely intended to take control of Media outlets, and monitor any and all electronic communications, looking for dissent and widespread fear.

A moral panic is the result of many factors, and is an integral reality of American culture. The panic is typically started by some isolated and anomalous event, an event that is considered to be of deviant behavior by the greater society that has conformed to some socially acceptable norm. That deviant behavior, however isolated it might be, must be dealt with by authorities. The experts and authorities of the society will, typically, then begin profiling the type of deviant person responsible for perpetrating such an unacceptable act, even, as was said, if the act is isolated and anomalous at the time. The media, in modern America, will then tend to pick up and sensationalize the story, along with the profile given by the experts and authorities. A particular subject is generalized, and abstracted, and labeled as deviant. The people, who have started to spread some fear, or social phobia of that deviant behavior, even though it was isolated, then tend to relate other events, which might be completely unrelated except through ambiguous use of narrative in the media, through generalizations and stereotypes until more than just the single isolated event is perceived by society. A class of events is constructed. The problem becomes larger than it really needs to be, there is some public outcry against the deviant behavior, and some legislation is generally enacted in order to deal with such behavior in the future. The problem is that the legislation is often brought in under prejudiced ideals, justified by isolated instances that are grouped together into some category through prejudiced values, and targets are made of some group of people who are ultimately seen as the subject of stereotype. The problem is created not only by the media, spreading stereotypes and relating what would otherwise be unrelated yet popularized events of immorality and deviance, never otherwise heard of by the population at large except through the mass media, but also by the experts and authorities who have adopted the method of profiling deviant people and groups in order to try and explain and resolve the problems of crime, drug addiction, and mental illness in our society deviant behavior. All of which seems to be included under the legal definitions of terrorism as its determined by fear under the USA Patriot Act. This particular method of profiling by the experts and authorities in our society does not seem to be working (Adartey-Wellington). Levels of crime, drug addiction, and mental illness, all of them, seem to be on the rise since the adoption of this method of establishing American institutions has begun.