A Times Editorial

Dangerous deal-breaking

U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is trying to break a deal that was struck with Democratic lawmakers to alleviate their concerns about the USA Patriot Act, the law passed soon after the Sept. 11 terror attacks giving the Justice Department sweeping new surveillance and wiretapping powers.

Concerned about the way these new powers would diminish civil liberties, many Democrats and some Republicans insisted on sunset provisions to retire some of the law's potentially abusive sections in 2005 unless Congress chose to extend them. But the Justice Department wants to see these new powers made permanent, and Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is apparently willing to violate the original understanding to do so.

By bowing and scraping to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Hatch is attempting to cripple the ability of Congress to assert its oversight responsibilities in the war on terror. His game is the same as Ashcroft's: to paint anyone who would question the expansion of FBI power as an obstructionist or worse.

Hatch shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. The sunset provisions of the Patriot Act are virtually the only leverage Congress has to demand accountability from the Justice Department. In coming years, Congress may choose to renew some of the powers at issue, but that should be done only after a thorough review -- the kind of scrutiny Ashcroft has been resisting.

Among the law's most troubling provisions is the power it gives federal law enforcement to spy on Americans without having to show any connection between the individual and terrorism or crime.

The law gives the FBI blanket access to the records of libraries, hotels, stores and employers without requiring any suspicion that the target of the investigation is connected to terrorism or a foreign power. Moreover, librarians and others required to give up the information are forced to keep mum about it, so the investigation's target may never learn that he or she was spied on. The result is that one natural avenue for policing abuses -- innocent people objecting to their own unwarranted surveillance -- is foreclosed under the act.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have attempted to determine how the Justice Department has used its greatly expanded authority. But many of the questions submitted to Ashcroft by Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have gone unanswered or answered in unhelpful generalities. Ashcroft has been dismissive of Congress' questions into how he has used the government's new powers.

The idea that Ashcroft should now be rewarded for this arrogance is a dangerous concession that could weaken Congress' ability to prevent future FBI abuses.

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