Patriot Act foes step up their fight
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By Jennifer A. Dlouhy Hearst Newspapers - Published: November 18, 2005
WASHINGTON — As the clock winds down on a bid by Congress to renew expiring parts of the Patriot Act, librarians, business owners and civil libertarians worked desperately Thursday to persuade lawmakers to put more limits on government into the 2001 anti-terrorism law.
The House was set to vote on a final bill to renew the Patriot Act as early as Friday, but in the Senate, a coalition of moderates led by John Sununu, R-N.H., Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., are fighting for last-minute changes that would restrict the government's power to use "national security letters" and court orders to get information on the patrons of libraries and businesses.
They have threatened using any means necessary — including a talkathon on the Senate floor — to derail the final legislation, which they say does not go far enough to protect civil liberties.
Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said he would "consider all procedural options at my disposal to fight a final . . . bill that doesn't fix the Patriot Act."
Supporters "may be able to get it through (the Senate)," Feingold said, "but I'm ready to resist."
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees, the coalition of six senators, vowed that "if further changes are not made, we will work to stop this bill from becoming law."
Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., are in the group in addition to Feingold, Salazar, Sununu and Craig.
The Patriot Act's supporters — including the administration — say the law is needed to ensure law enforcement officials have enough power to investigate suspected terrorists. And supporters say that critics are unable to prove the government has abused its power under the law.
Lawmakers have until Dec. 31 to figure out what to do with 16 provisions of the statute that are otherwise set to expire at the end of the year. Under a tentative compromise reached by members of the House and Senate on Wednesday, 14 of them would be made permanent and two others would expire in seven years.
The Bush administration had asked Congress to make all parts of the Patriot Act permanent, and to give them new powers to use administrative subpoenas. These would allow the government to subpoena records as part of terrorism investigations without first getting the approval of a judge or grand jury.
Congress rebuffed both of those calls, but the tentative deal on the Patriot Act still parallels what the White House wanted.
Under the deal, modest changes would be made to parts of the statute, including the so-called "library provision," which did not specifically target book lenders but made it easier for the government to get court orders for a swath of business records, as well as library patrons' book-borrowing habits.
The tentative agreement would:
— Require officials to assert to that they have "reasonable grounds" to believe business records they seek are relevant to an ongoing anti-terrorism investigation. Right now under the Patriot Act, they do not have to prove a records request is linked to a potential or actual crime. Critics want the government to be held to an even higher standard and attest that the information sought is connected to either a foreign power or a suspected foreign agent.
— Put new limits on national security letters, which the government can use to secretly compel businesses to release information about their patrons. Recipients of the letters are barred from telling anyone — other than a lawyer — that they have received them. Under the draft compromise, recipients of the secret notices would be able to challenge the record request in court — and seek permission to notify the target of the search or otherwise make the national security letter public.
But the proposed changes do not go far enough to pacify critics of the Patriot Act, such as Lisa Graves, a senior counsel with
the American Civil Liberties Union, who says many of the changes are little more than "window dressing" covering up "fundamental flaws" in the law.
For instance, Graves notes, recipients of national security letters challenging the requests in court would lose if the government simply asserted that revealing a letter would harm national security.
"You're given a right to challenge that means virtually nothing, because . . . it's hard to imagine how you might prevail," she said.
Former Republican Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a conservative civil libertarian who heads a coalition of groups that want the anti-terrorism law scaled back, said the letters "have become the weapon of choice by the administration to conduct fishing expeditions."
Civil libertarians and other critics of the Patriot Act have been fighting the statute since it was put on the books weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks.
They argue that the law went too far in giving law enforcement officers sweeping powers to go after suspected terrorists, and that there are not enough protections in the measure to guard against government abuse.
Now, their four-year campaign to scale back the law is in its final days.
For the Patriot Act's critics, this is a "critical time," Barr said. "We have no choice" but to fight now, he added.
If Congress accepts the compromise on renewing the Patriot Act — both the House and the Senate would have to agree with the proposal — lawmakers probably would not consider changes for seven years, the next time parts of the statute would expire.
For critics, such as Emily Sheketoff with the American Library Association, that means this is the last chance — for nearly a decade — to persuade Congress to curtail the law.
"It has taken us a long time to make people understand . . . our concerns," said Sheketoff, associate executive director of the association. "And we really felt in these last few months that finally, members of Congress were listening to us and hearing what we were saying because so many of their constituents were saying the same thing."
Right now, Sheketoff said she is "begging all of our supporters to inundate the Congress and tell them to vote no" on the initial deal.
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