[O]n the 17th of September Ashcroft demanded that Congress pass within one week a new PATRIOT Act which hadn't even been introduced yet. And at the same time that this was going on, the military was being deployed domestically as you certainly saw here in New York, but all over the country, and the roundups and detentions without charge were beginning.

On October 26 Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law, and I've been told that in the following days the ACLU's office in Washington got calls from several congressmen's office asking what was in the law that they just passed. We're talking about a piece of legislation that's hundreds of pages long and was simply rammed through. Then, on October 31, Ashcroft announced the surveillance of lawyer-client conversations to be official at that point, as Lynne will be telling us about later. And on November 8 Ashcroft announced that the Department of Justice was being reorganized on a wartime footing.

The USA PATRIOT Act deals with many things, including the detention of aliens, the surveillance of financial transfers, governmental powers to obtain records, the relaxations of safeguards on search and seizure, the exchange of information between agencies, new criminal offenses, and electronic surveillance. It's an enormous piece of legislation that consists of pages of insertions and deletions, and you've got to go and look at the original statute to see how it's being amended. People to this day are still trying to find all the little hidden time bombs that are included in the law. I want to give you some sort of idea of what's there by honing in on a few provisions to give you the flavor of it. For example, sections 215 and 218 now allow secret courts to issue orders for surreptitious entry, physical searches, wire taps, internet intercepts, including temporary e-mail addresses like Hotmail. What's also authorized is roving wiretaps. That is, no longer is it a tap on a particular telephone -- it's a tap on you, and wherever you go and whatever telephones you use anywhere can then be tapped under these provisions.

What sneak and peek means is that they can now issue a search warrant, come in surreptitiously, search your premises, and they don't even tell you about it. There's no more knock on the door, sir, we have a warrant to search your place for these particular items, and give you a receipt for what they take. That's all gone. They can now wait as long as they want to even tell you that they conducted the search.

Section 216 requires that the courts order the installation of surveillance of all to-and-from information on telephone and internet communications whenever the U.S. attorney certifies to the court that the information to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. It requires this; there's no judicial discretion involved there. And what I'm talking about here is the FBI's Carnivore device that they will put on internet service providers. It's not really going to distinguish between content and the who-it's-from or who-it's-to information. They're going to be able to record all the web pages that you visit and so on. And finally, section 802 creates the whole new crime of "domestic terrorism." And I love the definition of this crime. "Acts dangerous to human life . . . if they appear . . . to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." So if things that you do merely "appear to be intended" to coerce government policy, you can now be prosecuted under this new law. Perhaps a more apt analogy is the fall of the Roman Republic and the initiation of the Roman Empire. Because what we have witnessed over the last few years is an amazing grasp of power by the executive branch. There has in fact been something of a rolling coup going over the last few years that began with the attempt by the Christian fascists to oust Clinton from office. Then came the extralegal seizure of the presidency after the 2000 election. And now the whole panoply of measures in the wake of September 11.

I recently used a short quote from George Orwell's 1984 to describe the situation, in which he wrote: "The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival."

And to the extent that the fascist analogy is applicable we need to remember the famous epigram of Pastor Martin Niemoeller. You remember, first they came for the Communists, and then they came for the Jews, and so on. Here it's first they came for the Arabs, and then they came for their lawyers! [gesturing to Lynne Stewart]

There are three points to remember out of that famous quotation, three lessons. The first is that when fascism comes, it comes by steps and degrees. They pick off the opposition one at a time. So the second point is a corollary that to prevent a police state you must first come to the defense of its very first victims. And third, in the process of losing our rights, there comes a point of no return. Resistance may take the form of courageous school administrators refusing to turn over the records of foreign students to the FBI, or it may take the form of students seizing those records for safekeeping when administrators refuse to do the right thing. Resistance may take the form of supporting our service men and women who refuse to take part in illegal acts of war. Or it may take the form of defying new laws and measures that violate our rights of free expression and association. But resist we must.