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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Michelle Richardson from the American Civil Liberties Union.
She's been up there on Capitol Hill lobbying for, I'm not exactly sure what, not for the Wholesale Repeal of the Patriot Act, but I think against the repassing of this version of it or these amendments to it to help fill us in.
Michelle, welcome to the show.
Hi Scott, thanks for having me.
Yes, so Congress just passed another extension of the Patriot Act in the last couple of days and is on the way to the President for him to sign.
When the Patriot Act passed originally after 9-11 in October of 2001, Congress knew that it was expanding the government's authority and it wanted to make sure that it would revisit these new powers, so it included a sunset.
So every several years parts of the Patriot Act are set to expire unless Congress acts on them again.
And at the end of the month, three of those sections were once again set to expire, so Congress had to do something.
They tried to get together and pass some sort of substantive reauthorization, maybe looking at a few of the provisions, but there was disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, between the House and the Senate, and they ran out of time.
So they have now passed a three-month extension in the hopes that they could get together in the next three months and find some long-term legislation that they can both agree to.
Well now, when they set it up to go through Congress without comment, but by the rules it required a two-thirds vote and that failed, that at least was a victory for kind of the narrative of things, right?
Where, hey, some part of the Patriot Act failed to pass for a minute, you know, that kind of got everybody's attention, even though, of course, they easily had the 51 percent when they held the vote the other way there in the House of Representatives.
But did that seem up there in Washington, D.C., like an important thing that maybe coalitions from both sides of the so-called aisle there might be able to thwart at least some of this?
Sure, sure.
What happened was the Republicans...
I like to imagine shockwaves, right, but I'm picturing actual, like, little ripples at least, you know?
There were ripples, I promise you, there were ripples.
What happened was the Republican leadership in the House thought that they had such a slam dunk here that they could put the bill on a fast track.
There's a special fast track for non-controversial bills where the support is so overwhelming that they don't go through the traditional rules process, they don't give it a straight up-or-down vote, and they compress the process.
And if they can get two-thirds supporting instead of just, you know, half plus one, a full two-thirds supporting, they don't have to offer the chance for amendment or debate.
It just goes sailing right through.
And they tried to push through the reauthorization on that fast track, thinking that it was just so uncontroversial after the last 10 years that opposition had so faded that they would have no serious opposition to the bill.
And that failed.
They were seven votes short of getting that two-thirds.
So they had to go back and go through the traditional process.
It did pass.
It did pass handily.
But, you know, it does send a strong message that this is a closer question than they think it is, that there are people who still strongly oppose the Patriot Act, there are people who still have reservations and care about their privacy, and that they cannot at least fast track Patriot through without some substantial debate.
So what we have now is a three-month authorization.
Right now, those three sections of the Patriot Act are scheduled to sunset on May 27th of this year.
So we have three months to go back and organize and see what sorts of amendments we can put into the Patriot Act.
And, you know, that's really what we're looking at here.
We're not talking about repealing the Patriot Act wholesale.
Much of the Patriot Act was not controversial.
We're talking about focusing in on several provisions that just went too far, provisions that make it easier for the government to spy on innocent people, and that's what we need to address.
Well, and three of those provisions are the ones in question here, but there are more.
Could you give us a rundown on what y'all think is so abusive?
Yes.
One of the biggest problems with the Patriot Act is actually up for reauthorization now.
It's caught in this sunset every few years, and so Congress keeps voting on it.
And it's one that we think should be a priority for Congress to deal with, and it's called the so-called Library Provision, or Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
And it gives the government the ability to go to a secret court and get an order for any tangible thing that they deem relevant to their investigation.
Now, before the Patriot Act, they could only get things that belonged to a suspected terrorist or spy.
But after the Patriot Act, this tool can be used to get information, and it's anything.
It could be library records or tax records, or it could be an entire database of information on anyone relevant to an investigation, even if they aren't suspected of doing anything wrong.
And so this is sort of the classic Patriot Act tool that we have a problem with.
Before Patriot, you at least have to be a suspected terrorist or spy before the government could be snooping through your private life.
Now, after Patriot, you don't have to be suspected of doing anything wrong.
So this should be on Congress's short list of things to amend.
They will be voting on the Section 215, the Library Provision, regardless in the next three months.
And so they need to use this opportunity to make sure that it's used to only spy on people who are suspected of doing something wrong.
Another section that has been subject to abuse is called the National Security Letter.
And this is a letter that goes directly from the FBI to a bank or a phone company or a credit card company and asks for someone's records.
Now, the FBI doesn't have to actually assert that you've done anything wrong.
Again, like the library section, they just have to say that they think your information is relevant to an investigation.
And we know that the FBI issues 40,000 to 50,000 of these a year.
So we're not talking one or two, but 50,000 times a year, the FBI goes to Verizon or Bank of America and asks for someone's records secretly, and the company turns over those records.
It's then put into government databases, and then it's accessible by tens of thousands of federal employees once it's there.
So we are again asking that Congress look at the National Security Letter provision over the next three months and put some meaningful changes in.
Again, just limit the use of that tool to people who are actually suspected of being terrorist spies.
Well, and then, yeah, there's the whole lone wolf thing.
So not only can they go on a fishing expedition, but they can just pick a target and go on a fishing expedition against them.
And of course, as we've seen over the last 10 years, so often that includes sending in agent provocateurs to entrap somebody into saying something stupid into a tape recorder and then prosecuting them for material support for terrorism or planning to blow us all up or whatever.
Yes.
You know, we know so little about the Patriot Act.
We look at it and we see on its face that if they are using the tools that have been given to them, they are violating our rights in stop.
But we don't have the details about who the tools have been used against or how that information has been used once it's been collected.
We can look at other intelligence programs that we do have information on, for example, like you mentioned, the infiltration of peace groups, for example, or environmentalist groups or anti-death penalty organizations.
We have information now that over the last 10 years, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, they have been systematically targeting activists and infiltrating their groups under the guise of fighting terrorism.
Now imagine what they are doing with the Patriot Act that operates in complete secrecy.
You know, I think we have a pretty fair belief that, again, people who dissent from their government are going to be targeted with these very powerful tools and will be caught up in these investigations.
Well, and just yesterday, right on Capitol Hill, they held hearings talking about how, well, what we need is a new law that will mandate that every kind of software company around builds in a backdoor for the cops to make it easy to tap any email account, any Gmail, any chat room, or whatever.
Right, right.
Back in the 90s, Congress required that the telecommunication companies build backdoors into the phone system so that when the government came to AT&T, they were able to flip a switch and get the phone call wiretapped.
The administration is now asking that the same thing be done to the Internet.
The Internet was not really being built in a significant way when the last law was passed, so it has developed without this requirement.
And now they are asking that this requirement also be built into the Internet.
So I think what you need to look for is that those sorts of expansions will be added on to the next vote in the next three months instead of some contractions.
All right, everybody, that's Michelle Richardson from the ACLU.
Thanks for your work and thanks for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
