Patriot Act Reauthorization Delayed Till 2010

[1]Work to reach a final compromise on key provisions of the USA Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of this year has been put off until 2010. The expiring provisions -- including Section 215, which allows the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to search bookstore and library records -- are being extended for two to three months to allow time for the House and Senate to reach a consensus on a final agreement. Both the House and the Senate have Patriot Act reauthorization bills that have been approved in committee, but neither has passed its own revised version.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected a Senate plan to include the Patriot Act amendments in a larger Pentagon funding bill that is expected pass before Congress breaks for the holiday, in part, because liberal Democrats are already upset about President Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, according to Politico.com [2].

The House Patriot Act reauthorization bill would prohibit the use of Section 215 to search the records of a library patron or bookstore customer unless there are "specific and articulable facts" to show that the person is "a suspected agent of a foreign power" or someone who is in contact or known to the suspected agent.

Under the Senate version, which has the support of the U.S. Justice Department, a Section 215 order could be used to obtain "library records or patron lists" only when those records pertain directly to someone suspected of terrorism or espionage. However, this added protection would not apply to the records of bookstore customers. They could still be searched even when the customer is not suspected of criminal conduct.

At the end of November [3], the American Booksellers Association and its partners in the Campaign for Reader Privacy [1] encouraged their supporters to call on their senators to urge that the reader privacy protections for library records in the Senate bill also be extended to those of bookstores.

Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression [4], told BTW: "We hope that the delay in the final vote will give everyone the time to focus on the importance of restoring the protections for reader privacy that were eliminated by the Patriot Act. We're counting on booksellers to get on the phone with their senators and representatives after January 1."