And All This Time I Thought the Patriot Act Was Designed To Stop the New England NFL Juggernaut

Now I find it's anti-terrorism legislation, and the incomparably silly Fox News "senior judicial analyst" is firmly against it:

Where to begin? First, leaving aside how silly it obviously is to compare agents executing a court-authorized search warrant to burglars, a sneak-and-peek search is, in fact, the polar opposite of a common burglary. A burglar enters your home to rob you. In stark contrast, the warrant here is called "sneak-and-peek" because, just as O'Reilly implied, agents sneak into a home (rather than loudly announcing their presence or even breaking in, as they do with regular search warrants), and peek around — that is, they generally don't take anything (unlike the execution of a regular search warrant, during which lots of a person's belongings are often seized).

The whole point of sneak-and-peek is to gather information without letting the bad guys know FBI agents were there. If important items that a subject is likely to miss — like his checkbook — are removed, then the aim of the sneak-and-peek technique is destroyed. Furthermore, agents may not unilaterally "plant a chip in your computer" (by which I assume Napolitano means a device that allows future computer use to be monitored or existing computer data to be seized). Federal agents need a warrant, pre-authorized by a court finding of probable cause, to do that.

It may be news to the senior judicial analyst, but the Patriot Act did not give us sneak-and-peek warrants. They have been around for decades. Another newsflash: Such techniques are exactly how the FBI goes about proving the existence of a criminal or terrorist enterprise.

What a horrible intrusion upon civil liberties! Who came up with this "search warrant" business anyway?