Congress, still debating the USA Patriot Act, authorized a five-week extension of the existing act, instead of passing a more permanent reauthorization. The House approved the five week extension, to March 10, by voice vote Wednesday, and the Senate approved it 95-1 Thursday night, with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) casting the single no vote. Update: President George W. Bush signed this extension Friday.
Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the original Patriot Act.
Sixteen provisions of the original Patriot Act were set to expire Dec. 31, 2005, but Congress had approved a five-week extension which was set to expire Friday. This will be the second five-week extension for the act.
Earlier in the week, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, one of the negotiators who helped block the act’s renewal last year, told reporters almost all of his concerns had been worked out with the White House.
He and Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., want parts of the act to be rewritten in several areas, including giving banks, libraries and Internet service providers the right to appeal when the FBI seeks financial and other records of their customers and clients. — Associated Press
As it turns out, the FBI is a little overaggressive and stupid when it comes to library computers — and computers in general. In a recent case in Massachusetts, they tried to seize 30 library computers without a warrant, when in fact they only needed to look at three of them. The librarian quite rightly told them to go get a warrant while she worked with FBI investigators to narrow down which computers might have been involved in the threat.
“We were able to both protect public safety and also protect the rights of people, the sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers,” said Newton, Mass., mayor David Cohen. “Had we given them the computers, they would have gotten to see e-mails from ordinary citizens doing ordinary things and would not have preserved privacy.”
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Anonymous
Feb 05, 2006
Since the inception of the Patriot Act, it has NOT accomplished what it was intended to, rather just diminished our civil liberties in the process. The GAO-05-412 report provided to congress is abit skewed since its account of the Patriot Act deliberately neglected to mention it has produced absolutely ZERO results, in added intelligence, protection, that resulted in arrest of any terrorists or in averting any potential terrorist activities. Secondly, the GAO report sent to congress is is nothing more than collection of appeals by law enforcement agencies which recommends beefing up the Act to investigate money laundrying without any supporting substantiation needed for making the Act any more effective. This is abit silly. If they couldn’t find terrorists during the last 5 years when the Act was in force, what makes them think any terrorists organization might have kept money laundrying activities in this country going after 9/11, let alone now, when knowing the new revisions to the Patriot Act might take effect. People like Al-Qaida are not that stupid you know. Afterall, Al-Qaida has been very successful at eluding the law before and after 9/11, and despite all the resources at hand, they still haven’t been able to nab Usama Bin Laden either. It is pretty obvious law enforcement lobbying is hard at work playing up the paranoia card, but law enforcement in the field is seriously behind the power curve in brains. So, whatever nebulus benefit they may think they will get by beefing up the Patriot Act, the end results will still be nil and what remains of our civil liberties will be in the toilet. What a price to pay! The Patriot Act needs to be in the toilet instead.
Dan
Feb 05, 2006
Aggressive and stupid pretty much describes the Bush regime as a whole… look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Aggressive and stupid…