Checking Their Spines at the Door

Another Cave-In on the Patriot Act

Published: February 11, 2006

The Patriot Act has been one of the few issues on which Congress has shown backbone lately. Last year, it refused to renew expiring parts of the act until greater civil liberties protections were added. But key members of the Senate have now caved, agreeing to renew these provisions in exchange for only minimal improvements. At a time when the public is growing increasingly concerned about the lawlessness of the Bush administration's domestic spying, the Senate should insist that any reauthorization agreement do more to protect Americans against improper secret searches...

...This week, four key Republican senators — later backed by two Democrats — said that they had agreed to a deal with the White House. It is one that does little to protect Americans from government invasions of their privacy.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Patriot Act is the "gag order" imposed by Section 215, which prohibits anyone holding financial, medical and other private records of ordinary Americans from saying anything when the government issues a subpoena for those records. That means that a person whose records are being taken, and whose privacy is being invaded, has no way to know about the subpoena and no way to challenge it...

...another problem with Section 215: it lets the government go on fishing expeditions, spying on Americans with no connection to terrorism or foreign powers. The act should require the government, in order to get a subpoena, to show that there is a connection between the information it is seeking and a terrorist or a spy.

But the deal would allow subpoenas in instances when there are reasonable grounds for simply believing that information is relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is an extremely low bar.

One of the most well-publicized objections to the Patriot Act is the fact that it allows the government to issue national security letters, an extremely broad investigative tool, to libraries, forcing them to turn over their patrons' Internet records. The wording of the compromise is unclear. If it actually says that national security letters cannot be used to get Internet records from libraries, that would be an improvement, but it is not clear that it does.

In late December, it looked as if there was bipartisan interest in the Senate for changing the worst Patriot Act provisions and standing up for Americans' privacy rights. Now the hope of making the needed improvements has faded considerably.

All of a sudden, when people even within the Republican party are questioning the motivations of Dear Leader, Abu Gonzales, and the NSA data mining, we have capitulation on Patriot 2.

A question comes to mind: who in Congress is not being secretly blackmailed by this administration in the guise of national security?