Congress sends terrorism-fighting bill to Obama

House Speaker John Boehner Ohio ges­tures dur­ing his weekly news con­fer­ence on Capi­tol Hill in Wash­ing­ton, Thurs­day, May 26, 2011. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg)

JIM ABRAMS

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Con­gress on Thurs­day passed a four-year exten­sion of post-Sept. 11 pow­ers to search records and con­duct rov­ing wire­taps in pur­suit of ter­ror­ists. Votes taken in rapid suc­ces­sion in the Sen­ate and House came after law­mak­ers rejected attempts to tem­per the law enforce­ment pow­ers to ensure that indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties are not abused.

Fol­low­ing the 250–153 evening vote in the House, the leg­is­la­tion to renew three terrorism-fighting author­i­ties headed for the president’s sig­na­ture with only hours to go before the pro­vi­sions expire at midnight.

With Obama cur­rently in Europe, the White House said the pres­i­dent would use an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual sig­na­ture. It is only used with proper autho­riza­tion of the pres­i­dent. Obama will be awak­ened at 5:45 a.m. in France so he can review and approve the bill and autho­rize his sig­na­ture, the White House said.

A short-term expi­ra­tion would not inter­rupt ongo­ing oper­a­tions but would bar the gov­ern­ment from seek­ing war­rants for new investigations.

Con­gress bumped up against the dead­line mainly because of the stub­born resis­tance from a sin­gle sen­a­tor, Repub­li­can fresh­man Rand Paul of Ken­tucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting pow­ers as an abuse of pri­vacy rights. Paul held up the final vote for sev­eral days while he demanded a chance to change the bill to dimin­ish the government’s abil­ity to mon­i­tor indi­vid­ual actions. The bill passed the Sen­ate 72–23.

The mea­sure would add four years to the legal life of rov­ing wire­taps — those autho­rized for a per­son rather than a com­mu­ni­ca­tions line or device — of court-ordered searches of busi­ness records and of sur­veil­lance of non-American “lone wolf” sus­pects with­out con­firmed ties to ter­ror­ist groups.

The rov­ing wire­taps and access to busi­ness records are small parts of the USA Patriot Act enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But unlike most of the act, which is per­ma­nent law, those pro­vi­sions must be renewed peri­od­i­cally because of con­cerns that they could be used to vio­late pri­vacy rights. The same applies to the “lone wolf” pro­vi­sion, which was part of a 2004 intel­li­gence law.

Paul argued that in the rush to meet the ter­ror­ist threat in 2001 Con­gress enacted a Patriot Act that tram­ples on indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties. He had some back­ing from lib­eral Democ­rats and civil lib­er­ties groups who have long con­tended the law gives the gov­ern­ment author­ity to spy on inno­cent citizens.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he voted for the act when he was a House mem­ber in 2001 “while ground zero was still burn­ing.” But “I soon real­ized it gave too much power to gov­ern­ment with­out enough judi­cial and con­gres­sional oversight.”

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said the pro­vi­sion on col­lect­ing busi­ness records can expose law-abiding cit­i­zens to gov­ern­ment scrutiny. “If we can­not limit inves­ti­ga­tions to ter­ror­ism or other nefar­i­ous activ­i­ties, where do they end?” he asked.

“The Patriot Act has been used improp­erly again and again by law enforce­ment to invade Amer­i­cans’ pri­vacy and vio­late their con­sti­tu­tional rights,” said Laura W. Mur­phy, direc­tor of the ACLU Wash­ing­ton leg­isla­tive office.

Still, com­ing just a month after intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary forces tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden, there was lit­tle appetite for tam­per­ing with the terrorism-fighting tools. These tools, said Sen­ate Repub­li­can leader Mitch McConnell of Ken­tucky, “have kept us safe for nearly a decade and Amer­i­cans today should be relieved and reas­sured to know that these pro­grams will continue.”

Intel­li­gence offi­cials have denied improper use of sur­veil­lance tools, and this week both FBI Direc­tor Robert Mueller and Direc­tor of National Intel­li­gence James Clap­per sent let­ters to con­gres­sional lead­ers warn­ing of seri­ous national secu­rity con­se­quences if the pro­vi­sions were allowed to lapse.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion says that with­out the three author­i­ties the FBI might not be able to obtain infor­ma­tion on ter­ror­ist plot­ting inside the U.S. and that a ter­ror­ist who com­mu­ni­cates using dif­fer­ent cell phones and email accounts could escape timely surveillance.

“When the clock strikes mid­night tomor­row, we would be giv­ing ter­ror­ists the oppor­tu­nity to plot attacks against our coun­try, unde­tected,” Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid said on the Sen­ate floor Wednes­day. In unusu­ally per­sonal crit­i­cism of a fel­low sen­a­tor, he warned that Paul, by block­ing swift pas­sage of the bill, “is threat­en­ing to take away the best tools we have for stop­ping them.”

The nation itself is divided over the Patriot Act, as reflected in a Pew Research Cen­ter poll last Feb­ru­ary, before the killing of bin Laden, that found that 34 per­cent felt the law “goes too far and poses a threat to civil lib­er­ties. Some 42 per­cent con­sid­ered it “a nec­es­sary tool that helps the gov­ern­ment find ter­ror­ists.” That was a slight turn­around from 2004 when 39 per­cent thought it went too far and 33 per­cent said it was necessary.

Paul, after com­plain­ing that Reid’s remarks were “per­son­ally insult­ing,” asked whether the nation “should have some rules that say before they come into your house, before they go into your bank­ing records, that a judge should be asked for per­mis­sion, that there should be judi­cial review? Do we want a law­less land?”

Paul agreed to let the bill go for­ward after he was given a vote on two amend­ments to rein in gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance pow­ers. Both were soundly defeated. The more con­tro­ver­sial, an amend­ment that would have restricted pow­ers to obtain gun records in ter­ror­ist inves­ti­ga­tions, was defeated 85–10 after law­mak­ers received a let­ter from the National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion stat­ing that it was not tak­ing a posi­tion on the measure.

Accord­ing to a senior Jus­tice Depart­ment national secu­rity offi­cial tes­ti­fy­ing to Con­gress last March, the gov­ern­ment has sought rov­ing wire­tap author­ity in about 20 cases a year between 2001 and 2010 and has sought war­rants for busi­ness records less than 40 times a year, on aver­age. The gov­ern­ment has yet to use the lone wolf authority.

But the ACLU also points out that court approvals for busi­ness record access jumped from 21 in 2009 to 96 last year, and the orga­ni­za­tion con­tends the Patriot Act has blurred the line between inves­ti­ga­tions of actual ter­ror­ists and those not sus­pected of doing any­thing wrong.

Two Demo­c­ra­tic crit­ics of the Patriot Act, Sen. Ron Wyden of Ore­gon and Udall of Col­orado, on Thurs­day extracted a promise from Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee chair­man Dianne Fein­stein, D-Calif., that she would hold hear­ings with intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment offi­cials on how the law is being car­ried out.

Wyden says that while there are numer­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of how the Patriot Act works, the offi­cial gov­ern­ment inter­pre­ta­tion of the law remains clas­si­fied. “A sig­nif­i­cant gap has devel­oped now between what the pub­lic thinks the law says and what the gov­ern­ment secretly claims it says,” Wyden said.

Posted by AP News on May 26 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.