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View Full Version : WHy the Rush?



elder999
10th July 2003, 19:00
“It’s appalling the way this (the USA PATRIOT Act) was legislated,” said Representative Tom Udall (D-NM) at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently. He said the PATRIOT Act was written and ready so quickly after 9/11 because most of its provisions were part of a Department of Justice wish list which had been preciously rejected in committee because they were thought to grant too much power to the attorney general.

“they pulled all these up again, put them in one package and them played hardball with the Congress and managed to pass them,” said Udall, who voted against the act. ”We were never allowed to offer an amendment.” The biggest reason the act passed with overwhelming support, Udall said, was because of the sunset clauses written into the more questionable provisions, allowing them to expire in 2005.

Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch attempted in April to introduce an amendment which would scrap the sunset clauses. Since then, Udall has become more zealous in criticizing the act; he signed on as cosponsor to the Freedom to Read Protection Ac, which proposes to undo Section 215 as it relates to libraries and booksellers. Section 215 allows law enforcement to subpoena [B]“any tangible thing”that will help in an investigation. For librarians, that means patrons’ records. Further, if any librarian divulges the existence of such subpoena, he or she will be subject to prosecution.

Librarians have organized (except in Los Alamos… :rolleyes: )as some of the most active opponents of the PATRIOT Act. Besides joining lawsuits contesting the act, many have installed warning signs in their libraries. At UNM, the library administration issued a new policy by which record are deleted as students return their books. That means if anyone ever asks for a student’s record, all they’ll get is a record of what the student currently has checked out.