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This law, by and large, extends the same kind of crime-fighting tools we apply to gangs and mobsters to terrorists. That's not something that is an infringement of our civil liberties.
--
Gilbert, Craig (20 January 2004), "State delegation split on speech", Journal Sentinel, Archived from the original on 2008-01-16, retrieved on 2012-09-30 
--
discussing the USA PATRIOT Act

 

Paul Ryan

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The Patriot Act does not authorize the government to go into your house or read your mail without probable cause and a warrant. It does allow law enforcement and intelligence personnel to better share information and better coordinate with each other. It does give national security investigators tools like those criminal investigators have used for years. And it does update the law to keep up with evolving technology and increasingly sophisticated terrorists. Many of the tools in the Patriot Act are identical to those that have been used for years to investigate drug dealers and white-collar crime. They've been used effectively, and they've been used without an adverse impact on civil liberties. So criticism of the Patriot Act has always begged the question: if we can use these tools successfully and prudently in the area of dealing with, say, drug traffickers, why shouldn’t they be used in the war against terrorists who want to import chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to inflict mass civilian casualties?

 

Alberto Gonzales

 

I don't care, whatever political considerations I have are absolutely irrelevant to the decisions I make having to do with people's civil liberties and something as weighty as Americans risking their lives overseas. The day that I start think politically about those things is the day I should leave politics. --(In response to the claim that his stands on civil liberties may hurt his chances with moderate Democrats and conservatives.

 

Russ Feingold

 

I think when people talk about civil liberties, they sometimes forget that action taken to protect the citizen against physical violence and physical attack is a blow in favour and not a blow against civil liberties.

 

John Howard

 

We're fighting on many fronts, and Iraq is now the central front. Saddam holdouts and foreign terrorists are trying desperately to undermine Iraq's progress and to throw that country into chaos. The terrorists in Iraq believe their attacks on innocent people will weaken our resolve. That's what they believe. They believe that America will run from a challenge. They're mistaken. Americans are not the running kind.

 

George W. Bush

 

I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy. I believe that there is grave danger in this country of losing our civil liberties as they have been lost in other countries. There are things transpiring in this country today that are definitely menacing our future; among which are the activities of Mayor Hague and other little Hagues throughout the country. These activities are so basically wrong and so menacing to our institutions that every citizen and particularly every public official should oppose them to the limit of their strength.

 

Earl Warren