from the deputy attorney general... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: DAG LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 09:02:30 -0400 (EDT) [Note: The New York Times ran an abbreviated form of the DAG's letter this morning. Below, please find the full letter submitted to the editor.] LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES: You folks need to talk to real prosecutors and agents before you write your next editorial about the Patriot Act. Your recent effort (Editorial, April 21) grossly misconstrued the Act's provisions and resorted to empty sloganeering (for instance, that the Act "trample[s] on civil liberties"). You and your readers need to master the details about the Act and how law enforcement agents use it. Delayed notification searches (so-called "sneak and peek" warrants), for instance, have been used for decades prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act in drug and organized crime cases. These searches protect witnesses and preserve evidence by postponing notification of the target in sensitive ongoing investigations. I have personally used that indispensable tool during my career as a federal prosecutor, and if I had time to tell you the circumstances, you would be glad I did. The Patriot Act simply codified this traditional law enforcement technique and established a uniform national standard for judges to follow. You should have informed your readers that all delayed notification searches (before and after the Patriot Act) must be authorized by a federal judge and that in 1979 the Supreme Court dismissed as "frivolous" an argument that delayed notification searches are unconstitutional. You also mangled the description of Section 215, the business records provision. For reasons that always baffle me, that provision is often publicly associated with libraries -- a practice you continue -- despite the fact that libraries are not mentioned in the Patriot Act. Although I may never figure out how that happened, I do know that orders for records under this provision must also be approved by a federal judge and thus are more closely scrutinized and more difficult to obtain than ordinary grand jury subpoenas, which can require the production of the very same records, but without prior judicial approval. That is, the Patriot Act actually made it more difficult for counterterrorism investigators to obtain business records than criminal investigators. You might also have told your readers that Congress regularly reviews our use of Patriot Act provisions, including Section 215, and that when the Justice Department last declassified the number of times it had used this provision, the number was zero. The provisions of the Patriot Act are too important to our counterterrorism work to allow bumper-stickers to substitute for informed discussion. I hope you will continue to write about the Patriot Act, but please demand the details before your next effort. _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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