Patriot Act: What's not known feeds debate

"It's a core principle of our profession that user records are confidential. If you're not free to read and research and think, you don't have freedom of speech," says Patrice McDermott, deputy director of the ALA's Washington office, which is conducting a nationwide survey of public libraries on their involvement with law enforcement.

In his first appearance before Congress since taking over the Justice Department, Attorney General Gonzales signaled more openness to revising the law than his predecessor, John Ashcroft, who often said that bids to curb the law would weaken the war on terrorism and endanger American lives.

Still, when pressed by Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter on whether he would be willing to exclude authority to obtain library and medical records from the law, Gonzales declined: "It's comparable to a police officer who carries a gun for 15 years and never draws it. Does that mean that for the next five years he should not have that weapon because he had never used it?" he said Tuesday.

Patriot Act powers set to expire have been used to convict an Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who tried to purchase hand grenades to bomb abortion clinics, to trace a threat to burn down an Islamic Center in El Paso, Texas, to dismantle a terror cell in Portland, Ore., and to rescue ababy after its mother was murdered in Missouri, the Justice Department says.

But critics say this is only a partial list of how powers have been used, and that many are unrelated to the Patriot Act's objective of fighting terrorism. More comprehensive public disclosure of how the law has been applied is needed to assess its impact, they say. For example, The ACLU is asking Congress to make public how the Patriot Act was used to conduct a secret search of the home of Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield, wrongly suspected of involvement in the Madrid bombings. "By lowering the standard of a FISA search, the Patriot Act made it much more likely that mistakes like the one made in the Brandon Mayfield case would occur," wrote Mr. Romero.

"Too many people think the Patriot Act doesn't affect them, and that if it does, it doesn't matter," says former Rep. Bob Barr (R) of Georgia, who is now urging revisions in the law. "It severs the very foundation of the Fourth Amendment to say that government can invade a person's privacy and gather information against them without having a sound basis for suspecting that they've done something wrong," he says.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced bills to rein in the law. The Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) act raises the bar for secret searches and scales back the government's authority to seize personal information without judicial review. Backers range from the ACLU to Gun Owners of America.

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