EFF Liveblogging the Senate Judiciary PATRIOT Act Mark-Up Legislative Analysis by Kevin Bankston

[L. Coyote]

October 1st, 2009 - http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/liveblogging-senate-judiciary-patriot-act-mark
Liveblogging the Senate Judiciary PATRIOT Act Mark-Up
Legislative Analysis by Kevin Bankston

This morning is the Senate Judiciary Committee's meeting to amend (or "mark up") and vote on USA PATRIOT Act renewal legislation; the discussion of PATRIOT is currently ongoing and you can watch the live webcast here.

So far, not so good. The first order of business was an amendment in the form of a substitute to Committee Chairman Leahy's base bill, which was negotiated between him and Senator Feinstein who heads the Intelligence Committee; that bill is here. The amendment was accepted at the beginning of the mark-up without discussion.

This is both good and bad--the good news is that apparently, Intel will not be asserting jurisdiction over the PATRIOT renewal process and doing its own bill, which would ultimately be much worse than anything coming out of Judiciary. The bad is that the negotiated bill has even fewer PATRIOT reforms than the original Leahy bill, which already had much fewer reforms than the Feingold/Durbin JUSTICE bill. The reforms that the bill does contain, like the Leahy bill before it, only address PATRIOT and do not address reform of the FISA Amendments Act at all, unlike JUSTICE.

Next up, amendments: Senator Durbin offered an amendment based on JUSTICE, which would raise the standard for the issuance of PATRIOT Section 215 orders for business records. .........

[L. Coyote]

1. Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate * By David Kravets

Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate
* By David Kravets
* October 1, 2009 | 4:55 pm | http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/patriot-act-debate/


Powerful Senate leaders on Thursday bowed to FBI concerns that adding privacy protections to an expiring provision of the Patriot Act could jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee chairman, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) introduced last-minute changes (.pdf) that would strip away some of the privacy protections Leahy had espoused just the week before. The Vermont Democrat said his own, original proposal of last week could jeopardize ongoing terror investigations.

“All of us are mindful that threats against American safety are real and continuing,” Leahy said at the hearing . “I’m trying to introduce balances on both sides.”

He was discussing one of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act — Section 215. That allows a secret court — known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court or FISA court — to authorize broad warrants for most any type of records, including those held by banks, libraries and doctors.

The Leahy-Feinstein amendment, which is likely to be adopted by the committee and sent to the full Senate next week, does not require the government show a connection between the items sought under a Section 215 warrant and a suspected terrorist or spy. ..........

[Hekate]

2. Kick