“Congress had the foresight to make temporary some provisions of the hastily enacted Patriot Act,” ACLU Legislative Counsel Timothy Edgar said in a May 24 release. “It is extremely premature to make these provisions permanent when Congress has not conducted thorough oversight on how the Act has been used and what safeguards can be included to protect civil liberties.”
“The sunset provisions were built in as a safeguard,” ALA Office of Government Relations Deputy Director Patrice McDermott told American Libraries. Congress has a duty to provide oversight, she said, urging that “there should not be a rush to preempt that process.”
ALA is also opposing the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act, a bill (H.R. 3179) introduced in September 2003 that would permit criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for recipients of national security letters who fail to comply with the gag-order provision in section 505 of the Patriot Act. Currently, compliance with the provision is mandatory, but no specific penalty is stipulated. Recipients of such letters should “be able to challenge the gag provision in a court of law, and should be permitted to contact an attorney, congressional committee, or the Justice Department’s Inspector General without fear of being criminally prosecuted for violating the gag provision,” McDermott said.
Posted May 28, 2004.