Reform the Patriot Act

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Despite the insistence of the White House and the Republican congressional leadership that the Patriot Act be fully reauthorized before the Thanksgiving break, a coalition of Republican and Democratic senators blocked the Senate-House conference report until vital changes in the Patriot Act are made. They have rising support around the nation when Congress returns on Dec. 16.

Dec. 15 is Bill of Rights Day, celebrating the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, without which our founding document would not have become the law of the land.

I congratulate the patriotic resisters in and out of the Senate for not allowing the administration to retain sections of the Patriot Act, which 399 towns and cities across the country and seven state legislatures had told their representatives in Congress to change in compliance with the Bill of Rights.

Begun in Northampton, Mass., in November 2001, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, led by Nancy Talanian, has been instrumental in the national organizing of these resolutions to Congress through a subsequent alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union and a range of conservative libertarian organizations. Currently among those insisting on essential Patriot Act reforms are the American Conservative Union, the American Library Association and such business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.

These business organizations have joined with civil libertarians to focus on the Patriot Act's sweeping expansion of government powers to obtain a huge range of personal information by claiming only that the records are "relevant to an authorized investigation" on terrorism.

In an Oct. 14 letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, the Chamber of Commerce and other businessgroups urged reforms to provisions of the Patriot Act "which allow the federal government to require voluminous and often sensitive records from American businesses, without judicial oversight or other meaningfulchecksonthe government's power." Not only are business records involved in this wholesale invasion of Americans' privacy. Many of the callers for substantive changes in the Patriot Act are focusing on its expansion of national security letters, which allow the FBI to demand a huge range of records -- financial, Internet, college and university files, telephone calls and much more -- all without judicial supervision. This data is then put into FBI databanks to be shared with other government agencies.

Moreover, as Barton Gellman reported Nov. 6 in The Washington Post: "Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results from the bureau's authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing... Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect (allegedly connected to terrorism) a single telephone call, for example may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns."

As an editorial in the Fort Wayne, Ind., Journal Gazette said to its readers, and to Congress, on Nov. 9: "The fear of government snooping in the electronic lives of Americans isn't just coming from the left... The Justice Department has misleadingly touted the fact that there has been no substantiated complaint that the act was misused."

But, for one example, since another part of the Patriot Act, Section 215, allows the FBI to search a person's library-use records without notifying the person and indeed makes it a crime for anybody to report the FBI conducted the search, how can anyone know how to file a complaint?

I salute the senators who insist on these and other vital changes in the Patriot Act: Republicans Larry Craig (Idaho), John Sununu (New Hampshire), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska); and Democrats Dick Durbin (Illinois), Russ Feingold (Wisconsin) and Ken Salazar (Colorado). Also, Sen. Arlen Specter, who refused to sign the conference committee report.

To their colleagues in both houses, I recommend advice from Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 8): "[T]he continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they, at length become willing to run the risk to be less free."

To respect our Bill of Rights, it is up to Congress that represents we, the people to prevent this happening to us.