Attorney General John Ashcroft, a key architect of the USA Patriot Act, will visit more than a dozen cities beginning next week to talk about the contentious law passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and how it has helped the Justice Department’s war on terrorism.
The tour will begin in Washington on Tuesday, though an exact itinerary is still under review.
While civil libertarians, some members of Congress, the National Rifle Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others have charged the act allows government to invade people’s private lives, Mr. Ashcroft believes it has allowed authorities to disrupt and dismantle terrorist networks that threaten the United States.
“Since the attacks of September 11, the Department of Justice has worked to create an improved capacity to prevent terrorist attacks. It’s a capacity nurtured by cooperation, built on coordination, and rooted in our constitutional liberties,” Mr. Ashcroft recently told reporters.
“Congress took the first crucial step to enhance cooperation and coordination in our antiterrorism efforts when it passed the USA Patriot Act with overwhelming bipartisan support,” he said, noting the act repealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act restrictions on surveillance that had “hampered efforts of prosecutors and intelligence agents to work together.”
Mr. Ashcroft has called the act a “coordinated, integrated and coherent response to terrorism” that has been affirmed by a federal court and is part of a long series of reforms implemented by the Justice Department in pursuit of preventing terrorism.
In November, a three-judge federal appeals-court panel said in a unanimous ruling the Justice Department can use secret wiretaps and other sophisticated surveillance equipment to track terrorism and espionage suspects. The ruling overturned a previous order by the ultrasecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which ruled in May 2002 against an expansion of wiretap and surveillance guidelines sought under the Patriot Act.
The panel said restrictions imposed by the lower court, which operates under FISA, were “not required by [the act] or the Constitution,” and that the government’s proposed use of the Patriot Act was “constitutional because the surveillances it authorizes are reasonable.”
The Patriot Act scaled down FISA restrictions on FBI agents’ use of technology to track terror and espionage suspects — though agents still must show probable cause to a federal judge to conduct the surveillance.
Last month, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told a Senate committee that the 340-page act had made the bureau more effective by facilitating information-sharing “within the law-enforcement and intelligence communities.” Prior to its passage, he said, FBI agents were “walled off from intelligence investigations” by FISA requirements.
The act has prompted numerous complaints from citizens and civil-liberties advocates who say it exploits post-September 11 terrorism fears. More than 165 communities representing 16 million people in 26 states have passed resolutions condemning the act on grounds it violates civil liberties.
A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union said the act gave the FBI “access to highly personal ’business records’ — including financial, medical, mental health, library and student records — with no meaningful judicial oversight.”
More than 1,000 complaints of civil rights and civil-liberties violations under the act have been reported to the Justice Department, though a report last month by the department’s Office of Inspector General concluded following a lengthy investigation that only 34 were credible.
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