Jeremy Cloward denounces the vote by John Garamendi to extend Patriot Act powers without reforms. Representative Garamendi himself has made no comment to explain why he voted to continue one of the most broad ranging attacks against the Constitution begun under George W. Bush.

Abercrombie condemned the bill, saying, “Instead of carefully and thoughtfully strengthening laws that actually work to thwart terrorists, we’re giving government a blank check to trample civil liberties.”

Russ Feingold and Dick Durbin have not made a single statement about why they allowed the Patriot Act to be extended last week without making a single peep of protest.

In the face of the Senate’s repeated on-the-record votes against data privacy, it’s an outrageous hypocrisy for senators to vote for a resolution that suggests the observance of National Data Privacy Day – a day after the actual event is over.

Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties in the House Judiciary Committee, has announced that his subcommittee will hold hearings into the illegal FBI spy abuses.

Overnight, news emerged that for years, the FBI grabbed Americans’ private telephone records without any search warrants, and justifying the seizures of these records by claiming that there were emergency terrorist threats that in fact never existed. Thousands of times, the FBI completely invented stories of terrorist plots to attack the United States so that [...]

It’s difficult this morning to say that the Massachusetts Democrats are willing to take a strong stand for our constitutional rights, against the Patriot Act.

Whether Martha Coakley is truly clueless about the Patriot Act, or is using the illusion of ignorance to cover for a seething hatred of the constitutional rights of Americans under the Fourth Amendment, she is clearly the wrong choice to succeed Edward Kennedy.

The EFF is requesting assistance in reading the documents and considering their relevance. Please go on over and take a look at the newly released papers.

Those of us who still believe that the promises of the Constitution should be kept cannot win the debate in increments, begging for scraps of portions of our rights. Republican politicians interpret these maneuvers as signs of weakness. S. 1692 is an unsuccessful appeasement that needs to be defeated so that the worst parts of the Patriot Act can expire, as they were originally intended to do.