Yesterday, on Constitution Day, Senators Russ Feingold and Dick Durbin—along with eight other Senators—introduced the JUSTICE (Judiciously Using Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts) Act, which aims to fix provisions of the PATRIOT and last year’s FISA Amendments Act that threaten American’s fundamental civil rights and liberties. See a fact sheet on the bill for more information.

The JUSTICE Act was introduced to remedy three problematic provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that are set to expire at the end of this year. This week, the Obama administration announced that the Justice Department supports reauthorization of those provisions.  They did, however, indicate that they are open to modifications “to provide additional protection for the privacy of law abiding Americans…provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness” of the provisions.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains,

The JUSTICE Act would renew two of the three expiring PATRIOT provisions, PATRIOT sections 206 (John Doe roving wiretaps) and 215 (FISA orders for any tangible thing), but would also add strong new checks and balances to those provisions and to the PATRIOT Act in general, especially those provisions dealing with the government’s authority to issue National Security Letters. If passed, the bill would also establish critically important protections for Americans against surveillance authorized under the [FISA Amendments Act].

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee strongly supports the JUSTICE Act.

Tags: Barack Obama, Constitution, Constitution Day, FISA, JUSTICE Act, PATRIOT Act, surveillance, wiretapping

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.