Mr. President, four years ago, following one of the most devastating attacks in our nation’s history, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act to give our nation’s law enforcement the tools they needed to track down terrorists who plot and lurk within our own borders and all over the world - terrorists who, right now, are looking to exploit weaknesses in our laws and our security to carry out even deadlier attacks than we saw on September 11th.

We all agreed that we needed legislation to make it harder for suspected terrorists to go undetected in this country. Americans everywhere wanted that.

But soon after the PATRIOT Act passed, a few years before I ever arrived in the Senate, I began hearing concerns from people of every background and political leaning that this law didn’t just provide law enforcement the powers it needed to keep us safe, but powers it didn’t need to invade our privacy without cause or suspicion.

Now, at times this issue has tended to degenerate into an “either-or” type of debate. Either we protect our people from terror or we protect our most cherished principles. But that is a false choice. It asks too little of us and assumes too little about America.

Fortunately, last year, the Senate recognized that this was a false choice. We put patriotism before partisanship and engaged in a real, open, and substantive debate about how to fix the PATRIOT Act. And Republicans and Democrats came together to propose sensible improvements to the Act. Unfortunately, the House was resistant to these changes, and that’s why we’re voting on the compromise before us.

Let me be clear: this compromise is not as good as the Senate version of the bill, nor is it as good as the SAFE Act that I have cosponsored. I suspect the vast majority of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle feel the same way. But, it’s still better than what the House originally proposed.

This compromise does modestly improve the PATRIOT Act by strengthening civil liberties protections without sacrificing the tools that law enforcement needs to keep us safe. In this compromise:

We strengthened judicial review of both National Security Letters, the administrative subpoenas used by the FBI, and Section 215 orders, which can be used to obtain medical, financial and other personal records.

We established hard time limits on sneak-and-peak searches and limits on roving wiretaps.

We protected most libraries from being subject to National Security Letters.

We preserved an individual’s right to seek counsel and hire an attorney without fearing the FBI’s wrath.

And we allowed judicial review of the gag orders that accompany Section 215 searches.

The compromise is far from perfect. I would have liked to see stronger judicial review of National Security Letters and shorter time limits on sneak and peak searches, among other things.

Sen. Feingold has proposed several sensible amendments - that I support - to address these issues. Unfortunately, the Majority Leader is preventing Sen. Feingold from offering these amendments through procedural tactics. That is regrettable because it flies in the face of the bipartisan cooperation that allowed the Senate to pass unanimously its version of the Patriot Act - a version that balanced security and civil liberties, partisanship and patriotism.

The Majority Leader’s tactics are even more troubling because we will need to work on a bipartisan basis to address national security challenges in the weeks and months to come. In particular, members on both sides of the aisle will need to take a careful look at President Bush’s use of warrantless wiretaps and determine the right balance between protecting our security and safeguarding our civil liberties. This is a complex issue. But only by working together and avoiding election-year politicking will we be able to give our government the necessary tools to wage the war on terror without sacrificing the rule of law.

So, I will be supporting the Patriot Act compromise. But I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections in the Patriot Act after it is reauthorized.

I thank the chair and yield the floor.

Tom,

Can I call ya Tom? “Mr. Tucker” seems much too respectful, and reminds me of a self-indulgent & egotistical character on Family Guy. (Wow, that joke writes itself, doesn’t it?)

Tom, I have recently seen & heard your comments to Hal Tanner, when Mr. Tanner asked for a recorded vote on a bill that would shift notification to the public of local government actions to the internet, and away from printed media like newspapers.

Your comment was, “I am the senator, you are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”

I’ll try to be gentle, as your ego is apparently fragile as a 17 year old’s hymen. But let me start with this: You Sir, are a horse’s ass. You, and those like you, are the reason people like me are anarchists. And we are many in number, and unified in our goals. You are the reason people blindly put their feet in the pool of patriotism, splashing up the waves of obedience and immorality.

See Tom, anarchists don’t believe in you, your job, your self-empowered at the expense of citizens, or the sole purpose of government, which is to propagate itself and secure its own livelihood and existence . The people govern themselves freely, without violence, without aggression, and without someone taxing (ie stealing) them in the process. The very problem people have with politicians is that they don’t feel represented (because honestly, how can one person represent 20,000, 50,000, or even 500,000 people?), and they don’t feel heard. Moreover, when arrogance enters the picture, like yours, it stinks worse than dead bodies in the streets of Afghanistan after a drone strike.

It’s easy to tell that you’re one of the good ol’ boys. You think you have the inside track to most things, that there’s a bigger picture, and that the common citizen is clueless to that. Well thank baby Jesus you’re in office to set everyone straight. Thugs like you thrive on that sort of ignorance. You eat it up, and use it for your own benefit, constantly jockeying for position and power.

I’d suggest leaving your keys w/ your secretary (who you may or may not be poking on the side, because - you have no morals anyway), and find a line of work in the third act of your life that is moral and note worthy. Because one day, anarchists will render government, and its workers who are paid with the wages of others, utterly useless & irrelevant. The fact is that you already are all those things, but it just hasn’t sunk into your thick skull yet.

Good day. And get a real job.

The “truths” we’re taught to believe from birth - whether nationalistic, religious, or cultural - should be the ones treated with the greatest skepticism if we continue to embrace them in adulthood, precisely because the probability is so great that we’ve embraced them because we were trained to, or because our subjective influences led us to them, and not because we’ve rationally assessed them to be true. …

That doesn’t mean that what we’re taught to believe from childhood is wrong or should be presumed erroneous. We may get lucky and be trained from the start to believe what is actually true. That’s possible. But we should at least regard those precepts with great suspicion, to subject them to particularly rigorous scrutiny, especially when it comes to those that teach us to believe in our own objective superiority or that of the group to which we belong.