A subset of the Patriot Act expires at the end of this year. Therefore the Bush administration is pushing Congress to renew them. Background on the votes this summer on the different versions of the Patriot Act: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:s.01389: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:H.R.3199: House vote for reauthorization in July (see how your 'critter voted): http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll414.xml General background on the different sections of the Patriot Act: http://www.patriotdebates.com/ The letter in question is excerpted below. -Declan -------------- http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/usapatriot/senateletter_111705.pdf We write to express our deep concern about the draft Patriot Act reauthorization conference report made available to us early this afternoon. As you know, the Senate version of the bill, passed by unanimous consent in July, was itself a compromise that resulted from intense negotiations by Senators from all sides of the partisan and ideological divides. Unfortunately, the conference committee draft retreats significantly from the bipartisan consensus we reached in the Senate. It does not accomplish what we and many of our colleaguesin the Senatebelieveis necessary-- a reauthorization bill that continues to provide law enforcement with the tools to investigate possible terrorist activity while making reasonable changes to the original law to protect innocent people from unnecessary and intrusive government surveillance... For the past several years, our bipartisan coalition has been working together to highlight and fix the civil liberties problems posed by the Patriot Act. We introduced the SAFE Act to address those problems, while still maintaining important law enforcement powers needed to combat terrorism. We cannot support a conference report that would eliminate the modest protections for civil liberties that were agreed to unanimously in the Senate. The conference report, in its current form, is unacceptable. We hope that you, as members of the conference committee, will consider making the changes set forth above. If further changes are not made, we will work to stop this bill from becoming law. Thank you for your consideration. _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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