Patriot Act Negotiations Favor Administration's Preferences

-- Library Journal, 11/18/2005

It's been a month of setbacks for the American Library Association (ALA) and allies hoping to weaken the strictures of the USA PATRIOT Act. In early November, Congressional negotiators dropped the Sanders amendment—language that would deny funding for searches of library, bookstore, and other business records—from a spending bill. And Wednesday, a Congressional conference committee mostly failed to adopt reader privacy provisions the ALA and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, have advocated. For the controversial Section 215, which makes it easier to search the above-mentioned records, the negotiators adopted a provision that requires review in seven years, rather than the four-year "sunset clause" favored by the Senate, but less than the ten-year period favored by the House of Representatives.

The compromise also leaves in place the lowered standards faced by FBI agents, who without judicial review can obtain National Security Letters (NSLs) to look at a broad range of electronic records. In fact, the conference committee report added a criminal penalty for a recipient's non-compliance and a gag order that bars that recipient from ever discussing that order. Such NSLs have been at issue in a pending case involving the Library Connection, a Windsor, CT-based consortium that has sued to overturn the gag order.

"It is regrettable that the committee did not take the opportunity to restore essential privacy protections to library reading records and respond to the concerns of millions of Americans over the vastly overreaching powers of the USA PATRIOT Act," said ALA President Michael Gorman. A final agreement on the Patriot Act was expected to be reached shortly, with full approval from the House and Senate next week.