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Thank goodness AIDS hit 20 years before passage of the USA Patriot Act-- the centerpiece of the Bush administration's domestic "War on Terrorism." Today, ACT UP is remembered as the group whose media-savvy, in-your-face tactics forced America's powers-that-be to address an epidemic whose victims they were content to let die. But if any future ACT UP blocks traffic, invades federal offices, and in the hurly-burly of civil disobedience accumulates raps for vandalism or resisting arrest, US authorities could pin on it a Scarlet T.

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The USA Patriot Act, which Bush signed into law October 26th, allows the US for the first time to designate domestic organizations as "terrorist." At risk are groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques protesters. Once certified "terrorist," a group's members and supporters-- or those thought to be-- will enter a Kafkaesque legal netherworld. The Patriot Act makes it a crime to belong to a "terrorist" organization, or provide it money or material support. Any non-citizens living in the US involved with such groups would face stark consequences-- immediate deportation, for example. Or, if a country of origin refused to take them back-- after all, America said they were "terrorists"-- then the US could imprison them for life-- no need to prove any crime.

If the prospects of a future ACT UP/New York are dimmed, don't expect an ACT UP/Toronto or ACT UP/London to step into the breach. Canada's parliament-- with Washington's thumb pressing down hard-- is set to make protests like those in Quebec City last April at the Summit of the Americas-- subject to prosecution as "terrorism" should they obstruct the passage of a delegate. A new Europe-wide arrest warrant, approved in December, covers terrorism, which the EU proposes defining as offenses-- from "theft" on up-- aimed at "seriously altering or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country." Greenpeace Paris had better make sure its copy of Microsoft Word is registered. Political activists that Eurocops can't lock up can be kept from travelling: authorities say they are developing a list of political troublemakers who will be prohibited from entering countries where protest is brewing.

US authorities like the idea. On November 1st, armed federal agents grabbed Nancy Oden, Green Party USA coordinating committee member, at Bangor airport, and kept her from flying to Chicago for a Green Party conference. Longtime AIDS activist and gadfly Michael Petrelis won't be attending any demonstrations soon. Claiming he was a "terrorist" because of alleged threatening phone calls, the San Francsico DA locked him up, together with Dave Pasquarelli, on $500,000 bail-- far in excess of what it would take to insure he'd show up in court.

'Patriots' don't need privacy

Judging by the response of Western governments, the new terrorist threat emanates not from Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda so much as home-grown political activists and dabblers in victimless crimes of sex, drugs, and ideas. The new legal regime taking shape in the wake of September 11th smashes long-standing pillars of civil liberty-- privacy, free expression, right to organize, freedom of movement, presumption of innocence. These state's new powers of surveillance, imprisonment, and control are not finely-aimed-- where they might be justified-- at conspirators plotting 9/11-style attacks; they apply generally to all police investigations.

In garden-variety sex and drugs cases, the Patriot Act gives the state extraordinary new powers-- with no sunset provisions.

Electronic surveillance. Police have long had ready access to "pen registers"-- the list of the numbers dialed from a particular phone. The new law expands that access to allow police-- without any evidence you've committed a crime-- to record every move you make on the Internet. In theory, the new data taps are like "pen registers"-- only recording the Web sites you visit and the addresses of those you exchange e-mail. But with a data tap, it's up to the police themselves to separate the URLs a person visits and the addresses he e-mails from the content he reads and writes. Which is to say that, in reality, the cops see everything and judges have no power to object.

Secret searches used to be allowed by courts in rare cases. The Patriot Act makes the exceptional routine-- and authorizes police, in any criminal investigation, to break into homes in order to copy data files, bug computers to record keystrokes and catch passwords, and plant listening devices.

Access to records. The Patriot Act requires schools, employers, banks, credit agencies, and medical organizations to open their files on demand to authorities, without informing the individual targeted.

As worrisome as these new powers are by themselves is the intent they share to free police and prosecutors from judicial oversight. Unlike ordinary search warrants, police get Patriot Act data taps automatically-- judges can't reject them. With ordinary search warrants, police specify what they're looking for and where-- no peeking in dresser drawers if the quarry is a stolen car. Judges can punish cops who overstep bounds, and individuals searched see the warrant and know the score. But secret raids remove limits on police snooping. Under the Patriot Act, search warrants can have national scope-- when a single warrant authorizes dozens of raids thousands of miles apart, a judge can't assess how it was carried out, and if it's not on his turf, may well not care.

War on democracy

America's Constitutional framers sought to keep branches of government jealous of each other's power in hopes of protecting individuals' rights. But more than upsetting the balance of powers, the post-9/11 regime makes an end-run around democracy itself.

Exhibit A: the International Convention on Cybercrime, hatched quietly by the Council of Europe, and unveiled in November. Set to be ratified by countries around the world-- including Canada, Israel, Romania, South Africa, and the US-- the treaty requires signatories to agree to standards for criminalizing hacking, copyright violation, and porn. The accord deputizes each country's police to act as agents for the others, to conduct raids on each other's behalf, and to guarantee "real-time surveillance" of suspects-- irrespective of a country's borders or the rights previously secured by its tradition or law.

"The Council of Europe in this case has just been taken over by the US Justice Department and is only considering law-enforcement demands," Dave Banisar, co-author of The Electronic Privacy Papers, told Wired. "They're using one more international organization to launder US policy."

But the treaty does more than launder US policy-- it reaches over the heads of even US courts and lawmakers to impose American law enforcement's wish list.

In October, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of a federal law that extends draconian kiddie-porn penalties to the creation or possession of sexually-explicit images in which adult actors merely "appear" to be under 18, and to purely imaginary images that a court decides look realistic. The justices needn't bother drafting a decision, because the Cybercrimes treaty turns the "if-it-looks-like-a-minor,-it-is-a-minor" standard into an international obligation.

Last year, Canada's Supreme Court-- a bastion of anti-porn feminism-- nonetheless struck down part of the national kiddie-porn law prohibiting private possession. The justices ruled that the ban, in at least some instances, came perilously close to criminalizing thought. The Cybercrime treaty throws that decision away, establishing mere possession on a computer as an international offense.

Other treaty provisions undercut constitutions and customs. The treaty requires member states to force citizens to divulge passwords-- a likely violation of the US Constitution's protection against self-incrimination. Some predict the accord will sound the death-knell for anonymous re-mailers and other modes of Internet identity- protection-- vital for political activists and the sexually marginal. In addition, the Cybercrime convention will be used to pressure Internet service providers to log customers' usage more thoroughly, so that anyone's e-mails and web clicks will be readily available in case the police in Bucharest decide they need it.

Brave new world

Proponents of the USA Patriot Act and the Cybercrimes treaty say these measures are all about securing freedom under changed circumstances. But it's the freedom of police and the powerful over individuals or communities that's being secured.

Sound familiar? The same principle is at work in NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, or the General Agreement for Trade and Services. These international agreements allow giant corporations, using secret deliberative bodies accountable to no one, to nix as "anticompetitive" a country's environmental regulations, labor codes, or standards of social welfare. Anger over this democratic usurpation fueled the anti-globalization protests at Seattle, Quebec City, and Genoa. The AIDS movement similarly focuses on how protection of pharmaceutical firms' intellectual property-- most of which in fact developed with public resources-- now entails millions of preventable deaths among the world's impoverished.

The speed with which the new clampdown has come, and its irrelevance to the 9/11 attacks, reveal that these measures were long in gestation. September 11th was just the excuse-- a chance to stifle the anti-globalists and further hot-up the wars on sex and drugs that, in the West, are sideshow distractions to the corporate land-grab-- with 9/11 itself the occasion for Bush to seek hundreds of billions in tax rebates and other corporate welfare.

If you're not for the military tribunals and domestic spying, then your with the terrorists, US Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress. Ashcroft has won the day-- the USA Patriot Act passed with a lone dissenting vote. The global police state emerging in the wake of September 11th will hit countless people right at home-- most of them involved in victimless crimes of sex, drugs, and politically unpopular expression. More generally, the new surveillance state inflames and depletes the political landscape. In response to unimagined crises to come, vital movements the likes of ACT UP will find it far harder to take root and flourish.