The USA PATRIOT Act, now up for renewal Congress, was passed at a time when the U.S. was in a state of heightened fear. We had just suffered the worst surprise attack since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and security was a pressing concern. Today, things have settled down to a sense of normalcy, and Congress now has to rewrite the act to make it consistent with our civil liberties.

Our constitution guarantees all citizens "due process of law" before government takes away life, liberty or property. It also guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." In order for the police to conduct a search, they first have to convince a judge that they know what they're looking for, their need to have it and have "probable cause" to look in a specific place.

Currently, the USA PATRIOT Act compromises these principles, sometimes severely. One section of the act will allow law enforcement officials to secretly search a home and not tell the owner for six months. It should be noted that such searches (known as "Sneak-and-peek" searches) were conducted prior to the PATRIOT Act, and may be justified if evidence is vulnerable to quick destruction. However, the PATRIOT Act makes such searches easier.

The act will also allow the FBI to seize a person's medical, business, library and gun-purchase records by getting an order from a special court that does not demand probable cause. This court was set up under a 1978 law (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA) for espionage cases only. The PATRIOT Act expanded it to include other cases. The PATRIOT Act also declares that no one receiving an FISA warrant can tell anyone else about it, which means, in effect, an FISA warrant cannot be contested.

The act expanded the use of National Security Letters, which are a kind of warrant the Justice Department writes for itself to authorize its agents to seize such items as records of money movements, telephone calls and Internet visits. As in the FISA warrants, anyone receiving a National Security Letter are not allowed to tell anyone about them and, therefore, they cannot contest them.

(An interesting fact is that National Security Letters were first authorized by a 1986 law for terrorism only. The USA PATRIOT Act has since expanded them for other uses.)

The House and Senate have each passed bills to renew the USA PATRIOT Act. The House bill addresses none of the above mentioned problems, while the Senate bill intends to fix some of them.

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