Where Patrick Leahy, the committee Republicans and the collaborating Democrats could make make a meaningless pose of expanded protections for libraries, they did. Where they could have made an actual contribution to protections for libraries from the Patriot Act’s National Security Letters, they did nothing.
The first generation of US citizens had plenty of experience with the way that unscrupulous leaders could exploit fears about security to impose tyrannical abuses against the people. Those sorts of abuses, given the power of today’s surveillance technologies, are more important to protect against, absolutely, than ever before.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was faced with a crucial ethical test yesterday, and most of the committee failed. The test came during a special executive meeting to consider whether to reauthorize the infamous Patriot Act, a law that was passed in a rush, without any senator even reading the bill, granting the Executive Branch extreme [...]
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 [...]
Last week, ten Senators introduced legislation that would begin to undo the damage to constitutional liberty inflicted by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. S. 1686, given the acronym of the JUSTICE Act, is a long bill; the following is a summary of its most central provisions: Revisions [...]
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