Panelists debate changes to anti-terrorism law

The anti-terrorism law known as the USA PATRIOT Act requires some fine-tuning, according to panelists at a Friday forum, but they failed to agree to what extent it should be modified.

"By and large, I think the concerns about the PATRIOT Act are overblown ... [but] there are a couple of areas that can be fixed," Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, said at an event sponsored by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Rosenzweig advocated a "systematic way of thinking about preventative detention," pointing to the British standard for holding suspected Northern Irish terrorists as a successful model.

But surveillance programs like the Transportation Security Administration's Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) should be seen as "opportunities rather than areas of concern," he said. The system will allow the government to more effectively target "people who are of real concern" and allow regular Americans to travel with greater ease.

CAPPS II will provide information "that is objective and not based upon the immutable, subjective ... characteristics of race or natural origin," Rosenzweig said.

Interest groups like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, however, are concerned that the government will be able to access the personal information of average Americans all in the name of preventing terrorism. The committee is challenging in court Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which lets the government obtain personal records from libraries, medical offices and other places.

Librarians have said the provision is invasive and have refused compliance if faced with PATRIOT Act requests. Rosenzweig called Section 215 the "angry librarian" provision and said, "The picture of a government running rampant through libraries ... is a bit of a chimera, a bit of a bugaboo."

"The effect is to put the privacy of many more Americans at risk" because they must comply with the records demands without informing the suspected citizens, said Timothy Edgar, legislative council for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Edgar pushed the government to "say yes to responsible anti-terrorism powers by saying no to ... excesses" like Section 215. He advocated passage of a bill that would require reasonable cause for the seizure of personal documents, limit the government's ability to conduct "sneak and peek" searches and curtail the government's power to create roving wiretaps. The measure also includes language that would limit the timeline for certain PATRIOT Act powers.

Rosenzweig defended sneak-and-peek procedures, which let the government search someone's belongings and not inform them until later. "Clearly there are situations in which this is of utility," he said. "Delayed notification [has] been around since the 1970s" and used for undercover cases like that of New York mob boss John Gotti.

"The idea that we would have the same sort of law-enforcement technologies to investigate John Gotti and not apply them to investigate Osama bin Laden ... is a mistaken set of priorities," he said. But the ACLU's Edgar said the argument that the government can investigate Gotti and not bin Laden "is just not true."