[IP] Justice Department defends Patriot Act in letter to editor [priv]
from the deputy attorney general...
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: DAG LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 09:02:30 -0400 (EDT)
[Note: The New York Times ran an abbreviated form of the DAG's letter
this morning. Below, please find the full letter submitted to the
editor.]
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
You folks need to talk to real prosecutors and agents before
you write your next editorial about the Patriot Act. Your recent
effort (Editorial, April 21) grossly misconstrued the Act's provisions
and resorted to empty sloganeering (for instance, that the Act
"trample[s] on civil liberties"). You and your readers need to master
the details about the Act and how law enforcement agents use it.
Delayed notification searches (so-called "sneak and peek"
warrants), for instance, have been used for decades prior to the
enactment of the Patriot Act in drug and organized crime cases. These
searches protect witnesses and preserve evidence by postponing
notification of the target in sensitive ongoing investigations. I
have personally used that indispensable tool during my career as a
federal prosecutor, and if I had time to tell you the circumstances,
you would be glad I did. The Patriot Act simply codified this
traditional law enforcement technique and established a uniform
national standard for judges to follow. You should have informed your
readers that all delayed notification searches (before and after the
Patriot Act) must be authorized by a federal judge and that in 1979
the Supreme Court dismissed as "frivolous" an argument that delayed
notification searches are unconstitutional.
You also mangled the description of Section 215, the business
records provision. For reasons that always baffle me, that provision
is often publicly associated with libraries -- a practice you continue
-- despite the fact that libraries are not mentioned in the Patriot
Act. Although I may never figure out how that happened, I do know
that orders for records under this provision must also be approved by
a federal judge and thus are more closely scrutinized and more
difficult to obtain than ordinary grand jury subpoenas, which can
require the production of the very same records, but without prior
judicial approval. That is, the Patriot Act actually made it more
difficult for counterterrorism investigators to obtain business
records than criminal investigators. You might also have told your
readers that Congress regularly reviews our use of Patriot Act
provisions, including Section 215, and that when the Justice
Department last declassified the number of times it had used this
provision, the number was zero.
The provisions of the Patriot Act are too important to our
counterterrorism work to allow bumper-stickers to substitute for
informed discussion. I hope you will continue to write about the
Patriot Act, but please demand the details before your next effort.
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