Patriot Act surveillance provisions extended in nick of time

US anti-terror renewal bill raced through Congress and signed with ‘auto pen’ by Barack Obama from Europe to meet deadline The US Congress, racing the clock and rejecting demands for additional safeguards of civil liberties, passed a bill on Thursday to renew three expiring provisions of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act. Barack Obama, who is in Europe, signed it into law shortly before the provisions were set to expire at midnight. A White House aide said he used an “auto pen”, which replicates his signature. Obama acted shortly after the Republican-led House of Representatives and the Democratic-led Senate approved the bill overwhelmingly. It passed the House, 250-153, hours after it cleared the Senate, 72-23. Democrats and some Republicans favoured more protections of civil liberties in the legislation. But congressional leaders, facing the midnight deadline and possibly short on votes, agreed to a four-year, unaltered extension of the provisions to track suspected terrorists. The provisions empower law enforcement officials to get court approval to obtain “roving wiretaps” on suspected foreign agents with multiple modes of communications, track non-US nationals suspected of terrorism, and obtain certain business and even library records. “Although the Patriot Act is not a perfect law, it provides our intelligence and law enforcement communities with crucial tools to keep America safe,” said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. “The raid that killed Osama bin Laden also yielded an enormous amount of new information that has spurred dozens of investigations yielding new leads every day. “Without the Patriot Act, investigators would not have the tools they need to follow these new leads and disrupt terrorist plots.” The provisions are key parts of the act, which was enacted after the 9/11 attacks. While backers say the provisions bolster US security, critics say they could be abused and violate the rights of US citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union, which has long called for changes to the Patriot Act, said Congress missed an opportunity to amend the measure to include privacy protections. “Congress has once again chosen to rubberstamp the Patriot Act and its overreaching provisions. Since its passage nearly a decade ago, the Patriot Act has been used improperly again and again by law enforcement to invade Americans’ privacy and violate their constitutional rights,” said Laura Murphy, of the ACLU, in a statement. The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, together with Rand Paul, a Republican senator admired by the conservative tea party movement, offered steps to bolster oversight of the Patriot Act and increase civil-liberty protections. Their proposed changes cleared Leahy’s committee, but neither man was able to bring them up for a full Senate vote. Leahy said: “The extension of the Patriot Act provisions does not include a single improvement or reform, and includes not even a word that recognises the importance of protecting the civil liberties and constitutional privacy rights of Americans.” But the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said: “The invaluable terror-fighting tools under the Patriot Act have kept us safe for nearly a decade, and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue.” The Senate had been tied up in procedural knots over the measure for days. It moved after pressure from the director of FBI, Robert Mueller, and the national intelligence chief, James Clapper, who wrote to congressional leaders, saying that renewal of the provisions was vital to national security. US Congress United States Global terrorism Republicans Democrats US politics Civil liberties – international Obama administration guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.