Antiterror bill gets fast track on jolted Hill

On the House side, the Judiciary Committee unanimously voted out its own bill, which included stronger civil liberties protections than the Senate bill. But after intense pressure from the White House, the GOP House leadership produced a proposal much closer to the administration's request. The bill cleared the House on Oct. 12 on a vote of 337 to 79, but GOP conservatives and liberal Democrats still promised a fight over final passage.

With last week's anthrax scare, the pressure to show that Congress can respond quickly to a national security crisis became even greater.

"Congress doesn't want to be charged with holding things up," says Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. "They're afraid of what would happen if someone pointed an accusatory finger at them...."

The new antiterrorist bill aims to make it easier to identify and thwart terrorists. It also challenges longstanding distinctions in law between gathering information for intelligence purposes and for a criminal investigation, where the legal standards to be met by law enforcement have been much higher.

Some examples:

• The bill permits law-enforcement officials to conduct more searches without notifying suspects. It also expands eavesdropping authority to allow tracking conversations of suspected terrorists on any phone, cellphone, or over the Internet. The Clinton administration proposed such an expansion of powers in 1994, but Congress balked.

• It also allows information sharing among federal agencies that would be forbidden under current law, including information from grand-jury investigations and wiretaps. Critics say that the failure of agencies to share information about terrorist suspects contributed to a failure to thwart the Sept. 11 attacks.

• It restricts access to biological agents or toxins that are not "reasonably justified by a peaceful purpose." This could especially impact noncitizens working in universities or research labs.

• New money-laundering provisions allow the secretary of the Treasury to require special recordkeeping and reporting measures from banks. The effect could be to exclude foreign banks that are primarily money-laundering concerns from the US financial system. Some banks worry that such requirements could also scare away legitimate customers.

In an important concession to those worried about civil liberties, the compromise bill would have many of the most controversial features of the new law expire in four years. The original Senate bill did not include sunset provisions; the House version proposed ending some provisions after two years.

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