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.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
RSS