Ever since day one, in fact. In October of 2001, Director Laura Murphy and chief legislative counsel Gregory Nojeim of the ACLU sent a letter urging the Senate to reject the final version of the PATRIOT Act:

The process that brought you this bill is terribly flawed. After bypassing a Judiciary Committee mark-up, a few Senators and their staffs met behind closed doors, on October 12, 2001 to craft a bill. The full Senate was presented with anti-terrorism legislation in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion with little opportunity for input or review.

Since then, the ACLU has testified at almost every hearing held to consider reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, including 2005, 2009, and 2011.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the primary architects of the PATRIOT Act, had this to say about the revelations:

I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.

Although the ACLU has pretty much debunked the idea that the FBI effectively regulates itself, the concept of self-regulation is sweeping the globe at the moment, especially as it pertains to public and private institutions. So, it’s worth exploring deeper.

In practice, self-regulation is hardly ever effective, and sometimes hurts the situation even more. As Professor John Braithwate put it:

`Self-regulation is frequently an attempt to deceive the public into believing in the responsibility of a[n] irresponsible industry. Sometimes it is a strategy to give the government an excuse for not doing its job (pg. 370)

Ignoring the misguided reasoning given for self-regulation, it does appear to have a number of fundamental strengths (see here). However, these strengths inherently depend on 3 questions:

1. What constitutes the institution’s implicit moral logic?
2. How accountable and transparent are its members?
3. How is authority structured?

For some perspective, check out the full review here. Discussion of these particular findings begins on page 172 under the heading “Compliance Findings”. Furthermore, the IG goes on to say:

Thus, of the 32 instances when an extension, conversion to full
investigation, or closing was appropriate, we found authorization
documentation missing in 20 instances or 63 percent.

That means, in 2 out of 3 cases, the IG found no evidence of who OK’d the extension of an investigation or what reasons they had for doing so.

In section 1.3 of the same report, under the heading “Privacy Impact Analysis: Given the amount and type of data collected, discuss the privacy risks identified and how they were mitigated”, it is explained that:

[SARs] from SLT law enforcement and other federal agencies will be required to pass through a Fusion Center or similar analytical construct prior to being passed to eGuardian…users will be advised..that frequent checking of the database for updates will be necessary..to ensure that information they have entered initially is supplemented whenever new facts are uncovered.

So, basically, the DOJ is mitigating privacy risks by giving your information to even more agencies, and encouraging their users to continue invading your privacy to ensure that any information entered into the system initially, stays up to date every 30 days. Seems legit…

In Section 1.1 of their Privacy Impact Assessment for the eGuardian Threat Tracking System, the DOJ defines “suspicious activity” as:

observed behavior that may be indicative of intelligence gathering or pre-operational planning related to terrorism, criminal, or other illicit intention.

You may notice that this definition is poorly thrown together and heavily dependent on the following:

• What sort of behavior indicates “intelligence gathering”?
• What sort of behavior indicates “pre-operational planning”?
• What exactly constitutes terrorism?
• What, outside of direct criminal activity, are the defining characteristics of “illicit intentions”?
• Finally, how much observation must take place to constitute the creation of a SAR?

Basically, this is not much of a definition at all, and it surely doesn’t facilitate any reasonable thought process before clogging up the system with more reports of “suspicious activity”

This fact came from one of the many classified NSA files presented to the public by Edward Snowden, in collaboration with Glenn Greenwald. It was reported by the Guardian in early June 2013 that:

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls”.

The “order” referred to here is a 17-page FISA Court order. Although this particular order applies to Verizon Wireless specifically, other telecom. giants have been implicated in similar offenses..

To reiterate:

• a single motor neuron + all the fibers it innervates = motor unit.

For the most part, different movements call for the recruitment of different motor units. For example, you are using a whole different set/pattern of motor units in your bicep to lift 5lbs compared to when you lift 30lbs. So how does your body determine which units to recruit?

1. Henneman’s Size Principle, which states that motor units are recruited in order from smallest to largest. So if you attempt to lift 5lb dumbells, you aren’t going to start off with the biggest motor units first, because that would likely result in some excessive movement.
2. Rate coding, which refers to the frequency in which the chosen motor units are stimulated. Let’s say you are trying to lift those 5 lbs, if the smallest motor units just aren’t getting it done, the body will increase the frequency of its nerve impulses (thereby generating more force) before it recruits the next biggest motor unit to help.

For a more in-depth description, see here

Again, the motor end plate is located on the muscle fiber, and serves as the post-synaptic structure, receiving the information carried by the motor neuron.