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Senators Stall Tentative Patriot Act DealHouse and Senate negotiators reached a tentative agreement November 16 on reauthorization of the expiring USA Patriot Act. However, a bipartisan group of senators blocked hasty action on the Patriot Act conference report, which favored the House’s version of the reauthorization that included fewer protections for civil liberties.The draft compromise would have made permanent 14 of the 16 expiring provisions and extend the other two, including Section 215, which eases restrictions on FBI access to business and library records, for seven years, the Associated Press reported November 17. It also removed a provision that would have required judicial review when the Patriot Act was used to search library, medical, and financial records. The six senators—Larry Craig (R-Idaho), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.)—charged that the compromise didn’t make enough “reasonable changes to the original law to protect innocent people from unnecessary and intrusive government,” according to the November 18 New York Times. “I’ve cleared my schedule right up to Thanksgiving,” Feingold noted, threatening a filibuster. The Campaign for Reader Privacy—including the American Booksellers Association, American Library Association, Association of American Publishers, and PEN American Center—also spoke out against the agreement. “There is simply not enough in the final bill to restore some basic First Amendment and due-process protections that were unnecessarily abridged in the hastily passed USA Patriot Act,” said Oren Teicher, the ABA’s chief operating officer. “It will still be possible for the FBI to trawl through the bookstore and library records of ordinary readers.” In a separate letter to the House and Senate judiciary committees November 17, ALA President Michael Gorman contended that the conference report failed to seriously address any of the library community’s concerns with Section 215 or national security letters. “After-the-fact reports and studies required for the use of Section 215 orders and national security letters strike us as an effort to give the appearance of addressing the concerns of the public without actually imposing any limits on the Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he wrote. The sunset provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire at the end of the year. Congress is expected to resume consideration of the reauthorization bill after its Thanksgiving break. Posted November 18, 2005. |
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