Conferees To Meet on USA PATRIOT ACT—Urge Congress to Adopt Senate Version of Patriot Act Reauthorization
Call Your Senators and Representatives at 202-224-3121.
Urge them to support modifications contained in the Senate bill, S.1389.
- The Senate bill restores some needed checks on the government’s
ability to comb through an individual’s financial, medical,
business, library, gun purchases or other sales records without any
specific facts or connection between those records and a foreign
terrorist. It also provides a meaningful right to challenge. Similar
reforms are needed to the national security letter power.
- The Senate bill creates a presumption that “sneak and peek”
searches can be secret for only seven days, with some exceptions.
Unfortunately, neither bill requires that records searches be
connected to terrorists, not ordinary Americans, and the Justice
Department has admitted that 88 percent of these searches have been
in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.
- The Senate bill would set a four-year sunset on three patriot-related powers to ensure that Congress has the leverage it needs to get answers about how these powers are being used. The House bill would set an expiration date so far into the future, ten years, that it would skip the next President and diminish the incentive for fuller disclosure about the use of these secretive search powers.
Tell Congress that protecting civil liberties and achieving national security are not mutually exclusive and that the Senate bill achieves those goals.