Protect liberties: Curb Patriot Act powers now

[struggle4progress]

What a useful irony: The very week that Rep. Tom DeLay turned a brewing attack on the judiciary into an all-out assault, cooler heads in Congress -- both liberal and conservative -- took steps to safeguard Americans' rights and liberties by seeking additional judicial checks on government power.

Those checks, embodied in the Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act of 2005, were crafted by Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, to rein in the worst excesses of the USA Patriot Act. That law was hurriedly passed shortly after 9/11 to help fight terrorism; once legislators actually read the act they'd passed, it became clear that the newly granted powers could easily and routinely be misused against ordinary American citizens.

For example, the Patriot Act notoriously gave law enforcement broad authority to secretly order library and other records to be turned over -- with no opportunity for challenge and with the recipient (i.e., a librarian or other holder of personal information) bound by a permanent nondisclosure rule. This section was recently ruled unconstitutional in federal court; to fix it, the SAFE Act would require "individualized suspicion" for obtaining such an order from a court, and would grant the recipient the right to challenge it in court. It would also require the government to show that a gag order was necessary, place a time limit on that order, and allow for challenges to it.

The scope of law enforcement's authority in this section of the Patriot Act not only demonstrates the breadth of the act's powers but also shows that it is impossible to know just how those powers are being used; the orders for personal information can be conducted in secret -- and kept secret permanently. <snip>

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5338228.html