Kevin Bankston of EFF writes:
Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary mark-up of legislation to renew expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act was extremely disheartening–in particular because of many committee Democrats’ failure to support new civil liberties reforms to PATRIOT(see our summary here). Those Senators who failed to stand foursquare behind Americans’ right to privacy against government spying should be on notice that Americans who care about civil liberties are very disappointed; those that did stand up for our rights deserve our vocal thanks.
Our first wag of the finger goes to Senators Leahy and Feinstein.
[…]
Sadly, it’s no surprise that Senator Feinstein would favor government power over individual privacy when it comes to debates over foreign intelligence surveillance, especially now that she is heading the Senate Intelligence Committee. But we expected more from Senator Leahy, who has often been a staunch defender of civil liberties and who supported a much broader range of privacy protections when PATRIOT came up for reauthorization in 2005. A press release from Senator Leahy applauded this new bill as representing progress, but we must respectfully disagree.
Read more here.
Image credit: Nerdy Wag of the Finger (48/365) by Tuffer (belgian edition)/Flickr, Used under Creative Commons License