Senator Coons asked the Senate to limit the extension of the Patriot Act to one month so that the Senate could seriously review and revise the law to reflect current lessons learned to scale back some of the broad authorities granted to government under the original Patriot Act:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggfToKCixGg[/youtube]
His full remarks are here. The Leahy-Paul Amendment that he talks about would have reformed how National Security Letters are used and would also revise the “gag” order placed upon those in receipt of the NSL.
Senator Coons:
The Leahy-Paul Amendment also deserves consideration because the last five years have shown us that substantive revisions to Patriot are called-for and, indeed, necessary. I’d like to speak briefly about just one necessary change, those to the National Security Letter program.
National Security Letters, or NSLs, are administrative subpoenas that allow the government to demand subscriber information from third parties without even having to go to a judge. These orders are also extraordinary in that they prohibit recipients from telling anyone of their existence.
In 2007 and 2008, the Department of Justice Inspector General found massive abuses in the NSL program, with tens of thousands of NSLs issued for purposes that had nothing to do with national security. Further, in 2008, a court found that the gag order in each NSL was unconstitutional.
Plainly, NSLs are in need of revision, both to bring them in line with the Constitution and to guard against abuses that have nothing to do with national security. I support legislation that would require that DOJ maintain sufficient internal guidelines to ensure that NSLs are only issued when the agents issuing them state facts that show relevance to national security. I also favor amending the gag order so that any recipient can immediately challenge it in court.
These simple reforms – as well as the others contained in the Leahy-Paul Amendment, do not make our nation more vulnerable to attack. That’s why, in 2010, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence sent a letter to Congress expressing the view that legislation almost identical to Leahy-Paul “strikes the right balance by both reauthorizing these essential national security tools and enhancing statutory protections for civil liberties and privacy in the exercise of these and related authorities.”
This Amendment was defeated, but Senator Coons is to be commended for supporting this effort at reforming NSLs. The Patriot Act needs a great deal more revision and reform than this (really, I don’t see why it shouldn’t just be allowed to sunset at this point) but this would have been a very good start. The Patriot Act was extended this week in Congress, in a low-key bit of bipartisanship across both Houses and with little of the media food fight that marks most of the rest of Congress’ work.