Yesterday’s markup was an opportunity for reform of the abusive law, with amendments that could have brought the Patriot Act closer to compliance with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Yet, every single reform that was offer was rejected by the House Judiciary Committee.
This morning, a visitor to the website franken.senate.gov will encounter a canned message: “Sorry, the web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties.” Senator Al Franken is upgrading his web page from a canned, stand-in version (the one all new senators get) to a new, fully-formed and customized web page. As he warms to [...]
At That’s My Congress, we would like to clarify a matter which may appear unimportant out of context. In context, however, the clarification demonstrates a small but consistent effort by two senators to reform surveillance laws in the direction of greater constitutional protection. In an otherwise excellent legislative analysis by Kevin Bankston of the Electronic [...]
Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama today declared in the Senate Judiciary Committee, “it would be a mistake for us to sunset the national security letter provisions.” Under national security letter authority, a provision of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, government agents are able to obtain personal information on Americans’ activities without the warrant [...]
I’ve just gotten off the phone with a staffer at the majority office of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I’ve been told that in tomorrow morning’s markup meeting, the Senate Judiciary Committee will indeed consider the provisions of Senator Russell Feingold‘s JUSTICE Act (S. 1686) when it works to finalize a bill regarding warrantless surveillance [...]
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, Al Franken refused to make any comment about the FISA Amendments Act, a bill which became law while Franken was running for election. The FISA Amendments Act(read text of the law here) legalized a massive electronic operation to spy on the personal communications of millions people [...]
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