The US Congress is moving to curb some of the police powers it gave the administration of US President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including imposing new restrictions on the FBI's access to private records.
A budding House-Senate deal on the expiring USA Patriot Act includes new limits on federal law enforcement powers and rejects the Bush administration's request to grant the FBI greater authority to subpoena records without a judge's approval.
Even with the changes, however, every part of the law set to expire on Dec. 31 would be reauthorized and most of those provisions would become permanent.
Under the agreement, for the first time since the act became law, judges would get the authority to reject national security letters giving the government secret access to people's phone and e-mail records, financial data and favorite Internet sites.
Holders of such information -- such as banks and Internet providers -- could challenge the letters in court for the first time, said congressional aides involved in merging separate, earlier-passed House and Senate bills reauthorizing the expiring Patriot Act. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the panel has not begun deliberations.
Since passage of the 2001 law, the FBI reportedly has been issuing about 30,000 national security letters annually, a hundred-fold increase since they first came into existence.
Last year, a federal judge in New York struck down a national security letter statute as unconstitutional because he said the law did not permit legal challenges to the letters or a gag rule on recipients of the letters. The administration has appealed.
Civil libertarians lauded the deal's preliminary terms, saying recent accounts of the FBI's aggressive use of national security letters have lent credibility to their call for caution.
"Without those checks and balances, there will be abuses," said former Representative Bob Barr, of Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances.
The Bush administration contends there have been no abuses.
"In the four years since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, there has not been a single verified abuse of the act's provisions, including in the department's own inspector general's report to Congress," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.
Hashed out over two months by senior House and Senate aides, the preliminary terms still have to be approved by a panel of lawmakers from each chamber and then by the full House and Senate. The process is taking shape this week, with the appointment of House members to the panel on Wednesday and the bicameral committee's first meeting expected yesterday.
The power to subpoena without court approval had been on the administration's wish list for more than a year but was never seriously considered by either chamber's Judiciary Committee.
Both the House and Senate versions of a Patriot Act extension, debated over the summer, proposed giving the judiciary a more explicit role in national security letters.
"The court may quash or modify a request if compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive," according to a summary by the Congressional Research Service. The Senate added more conditions: "or violate any constitutional or other legal right or privilege."
Some version of those curbs is expected to be passed as part of the compromise bill.
Less specific but looked upon favorably is a proposal to add a new restriction on evidence-gathering of classified material that would require investigators to return or destroy any materials that are not relevant to the probe, congressional aides said.
Polls show that most Americans do not distinguish between the Patriot Act and the war on terror, and a majority knows little about the four-year-old law. But the more Americans know about the act, the less they like it.
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