On the eve of Senate hearings on the government's power to fight terrorism, the Justice Department on Monday defended the law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks as "an invaluable tool" and released new data showing increased use of a particularly controversial type of search warrant.
But critics of the law, known as the USA Patriot Act, strongly urged Congress to give it careful scrutiny before extending the government's powers to track terrorism suspects. Several critical provisions in the law are set to expire at the end of the year, and on Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold the first in a series of congressional hearings on the question of whether to extend the law.
In advance of the hearing, Justice Department officials sought to strengthen support for the law in the face of criticism from people who say it gives the government too much power to track and wiretap suspects.
The data released by the Justice Department late on Monday centered on its use of Section 213 of the law, which allows federal agents, with a court order, to enter a suspect's home or residence secretly and search for evidence without immediately telling the target they have been there. The provision is among those set to expire at the end of the year.
The new data showed that the Justice Department used the secret warrants 108 times in the 22 months between April 2003 and January, for an average of almost five warrants per month. That represented a sharp increase from the last reported tally from October 2001 to April 2003, when 47 warrants were issued in 17 months, for an average of fewer than three per month.
Justice Department officials said they resorted to using the secret warrants in less than 0.2 percent of all search warrants granted to law enforcement officials. The secret warrants were used in a wide spectrum of cases beyond terrorism, including child pornography, drug trafficking, and organized crime, the officials said.
In explaining the increased frequency, a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of political considerations said: "It's the criminals who set the pace for how often these warrants are used, not us."
The law allows the Justice Department to delay notifying a target that a property has been searched if a judge agrees that there is reasonable cause to believe that disclosure would endanger someone's safety, prompt a suspect to flee, lead to the destruction of evidence, or jeopardize an investigation.
But the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics of the provision -- which they refer to as the "sneak and peek" law because the target is not immediately told of the search -- say it risks an abuse of power and should be curtailed. They point to the Justice Department's use of the warrant last year in secretly searching the home of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Oregon who was mistakenly arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombings because of a faulty fingerprint match.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, told reporters on Monday that his organization plans to press for reconsideration and refinement of the search warrant power and five other provisions in the anti-terrorism law, including the government's use of "roving" wiretaps and its demands for library records and other materials in intelligence investigations.
Pointing to significant support for recent congressional efforts to scale back parts of the law, Romero predicted that moderate Republicans as well as many Democrats would have reservations about extending the current law. Congress will be considering the issue, he said, in "a very different political climate" than existed in 2001, when it approved the anti-terrorism measure some six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
More than 375 governmental bodies, including five states, have expressed formal concerns and objections to the government's expanded authority under the law.
Last month, groups of liberal civil rights activists and others formed an unusual coalition to urge close scrutiny of several provisions in the law.
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