Evans Politics

Obama Sides with Republicans; PATRIOT Act Renewal Bill Passes Senate Judiciary Committee Minus Critical Civil Liberties Reforms, Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 8, 2009, by Kevin Bankston, excerpt quoted verbatim:

“Well, it looks like most of the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee weren’t swayed by this morning’s New York Times editorial, which cited this morning’s Committee meeting to consider USA PATRIOT Act renewal as a “critical chance to add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses that contribute nothing to making America safer.” Instead, the Committee just passed a bill to renew all of the PATRIOT powers that were set to expire at the end of the year, with only a handful of the original reforms that were first proposed by Senators Feingold and Durbin’s JUSTICE Act and Committee Chairman Leahy’s original PATRIOT renewal bill.

“Instead of adding more protections to the bill, as EFF and the Times have been urging (along with many other Americans who have been organizing Facebook and Twitter activism around PATRIOT reform), the Committee this morning voted to accept seven Republican amendments to the USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act to remove the few civil liberties protections left in the bill after it was already watered down at last Thursday’s Committee meeting. Surprisingly and disappointingly, most of those amendments were recommended to their Republican sponsors by the Obama Administration.

“After voting on amendments (vote counts and text of the amendments are now available on the Committee’s web site), the Committee voted to pass the PATRIOT bill itself, 11 to 8. Some Democrats voted against it, agreeing with us that it didn’t protect civil liberties enough, while some Republicans voted against it because of the few meager privacy improvements it did include.” ….

Read the full article, here.

See Obama Backs Extending Patriot Act Spy Provisions, Wired.com, September 15, 2009, by David Kravets, excerpt quoted verbatim.

It should come as no surprise that President Barack Obama supports renewing the provisions, which were part of the Patriot Act approved six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

As an Illinois senator in 2008, he voted to allow the warrantless monitoring of Americans’ electronic communications if they are communicating overseas with somebody the government believes is linked to terrorism. That legislative package, which President George W. Bush signed, also immunized the nation’s telecommunication companies from lawsuits charging them with being complicit with the Bush administration’s warrantless, wiretapping program. That program was also adopted in the wake of Sept. 11.

RECOMMENDED: Is a Redo of Post-9/11 Paranoia the Best We Can Do?, Truthout, November 9, 2009, by William Fisher.