Congress Moves Closer To Surveillance Compromise
By David McGuire, Newsbytes WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 18 Oct 2001, 4:43 PM CST
In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, congressional leaders took a big step toward completing a reconciled Senate-House bill that would substantially expand the wiretapping and electronic surveillance capabilities of federal investigators, sources say.
The Senate and the House earlier this month each passed anti-terrorism bills that would make it easier for law enforcers to obtain the phone and Internet records of suspected terrorists and would give agencies broad new authority to monitor suspects' real-time phone and electronic movements.
At a "pre-conference" meeting Wednesday, Senate and House leaders agreed to a compromise on one of two major differences in the bills, sources close to the negotiations said today.
Bradley Jansen, the deputy director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Technology Policy and another source familiar with the negotiations who asked to remain anonymous said that lawmakers agreed to include a four-year "sunset" clause in the final version of the anti-terrorism bill.
Although both bills were based closely on an administration proposal drafted by the Justice Department in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the two versions include a handful of significant differences.
Most notably, the House version includes a "sunset clause" that requires Congress to review many of the surveillance provisions in the bill after three years, and the Senate version includes money-laundering language not present in the House bill.
While the money-laundering clause appears to remain unresolved for now, leaders from the two houses hammered out a compromise on the sunset clause.
Under the compromise, the House language - which included a three-year sunset that could have been expanded to five years by the President - will be replaced with a defined four-year sunset, under which Congress would review much of the bill by Dec. 31, 2005, Jansen said.
Civil libertarians, who oppose both versions of the anti-terrorism language, have nonetheless argued in favor of a sunset clause.
"The bill remains a civil liberties disaster," Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) attorney Jim Dempsey said. "At least a four-year sunset would require Congress to do in four years what it didn't do this time, which is look in depth at these provisions."
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