With parts of the Patriot Act required to be reauthorized by Dec. 31, the Bush administration pushed hard to get it done before Thanksgiving recess. But a House-Senate conference committee draft report has been blocked by a coalition of Republican and Democratic senators who have pledged to stop a reauthorization conference bill unless significant changes are made when Congress reconvenes 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 Novermber 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 (ACLU) and a range of conservative libertarian organizations. 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.
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 in the Nov. 6 Washington Post ("The FBI's Secret Scrutiny: In Hunt for Terrorists Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans"), "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 in Congress, on Nov. 9: "The Justice Department has misleadingly touted the fact that there has been no substantial 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 any 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, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, (Pennsylvania), who refused to sign the conference committee report.
To their colleagues in both houses, I recommend advice from Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 8): The 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.
Nat Hentoff, Newspaper Enterprise Association, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.