The Borough Assembly Member: Bonnie Williams
When the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly weighed a resolution against the Patriot Act in mid-April 2003, 32 people testified on the matter. Only one man was opposed to the resolution, and that was only because he didn't believe a local government should take a stand on a federal statute.
The man's argument was something Assemblywoman Bonnie Williams hadn't heard before. The assembly narrowly dismissed the resolution with a 5-4 vote, and Williams was in the majority.
"They couldn't read me a sentence out of the bill, which in their view violated their rights," recalls Williams. "What I got were references to a large number--and there's a huge amount of literature out there--of editorials, articles, etcetera, which are assertions. They assert that it violates, but they do not directly quote the law itself."
The assembly's decision differed from that of the Fairbanks City Council, which passed a similar resolution in early January that included a clause ordering city departments not to obey federal agencies under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The section allows federal investigators to order from state and local governments, along with private institutions or businesses, any tangible items such as documents, records and books.
Williams found the resolution preposterous.
"That's civil disobedience," she says. "That is taking the law into your own hands without proof-positive in writing."
According to Williams, a crucial element is missing from the arguments she's heard against the Patriot Act: evidence that it violates civil liberties.
"All there is is this national outcry by some faction of the populace who has been pushed by a momentum--I don't know what--into believing that there's something there that violates their civil rights," she says. "So they're standing up and opposing it, but they don't know that it violates their civil rights."
From Williams' assessment, the act is merely a starting point for the road to forming the Department of Homeland Security.
"The reason the bill is 342 pages long is because it's the housekeeping necessary to create a department," she says. "Am I opposed to the federal government creating a new department? No."
A number of people, including the city council, are concerned about an information-sharing infrastructure between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies set up under Title VII of the Patriot Act, a system allotted $50,000,000 in 2002 and $100,000,000 in the fiscal year 2003, according to the bill. Some are equally wary of information sharing between the federal government's enforcement and intelligence arms, namely the FBI and the CIA, under Section 203.
Williams disagrees. She supports the collaboration.
"We had very specific laws which prohibited the sharing of information between our internationally oriented CIA and our domestically oriented FBI," she points out. "Now when you have a situation like that and you have bits and pieces of information picked up by the FBI and other bits picked up by the CIA, and the two bits can't talk to each other, and as a consequence you get a Sept. 11, it's an absurdity. Of course they should be allowed to share. In fact, they should be required to share."
Librarians have spoken out against the act, saying that Section 215 will violate user privacy, another unfounded viewpoint, in Williams' opinion.
"If I go into a library and check out a book," she says, "I have made a public action. It is not a violation of the Bill of Rights for the police, for FBI, for anyone to go and serve a court order to find out what I checked out."
If there was in fact a part of the bill that violated civil liberties, says Williams, the courts will catch it. That's what the courts are for, she points out.
"I believe strongly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights," she says thoughtfully. "I think that our forefathers developed a brilliant, maybe the best, form of government ever created. It comes in three parts."
They balance each other," she continues, "They check each other. We have used that for over 200 years and it has worked."
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