USA PATRIOT Act | Facts, History, Acronym, & Controversy (2024)

USA PATRIOT Act, U.S. legislation, passed by Congress in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush in October 2001, that significantly expanded the search and surveillance powers of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. The USA PATRIOT Act, as amended and reauthorized from 2003, made numerous changes to existing statutes relating to the privacy of telephone and electronic communications, the operation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, money laundering, immigration, and other areas. It also defined a host of new crimes and increased penalties for existing ones.

History

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration submitted to Congress draft legislation designed to expand the powers of the government to surveil, investigate, and detain suspected terrorists. The eventual Senate bill, the Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act, was passed (96–1) on October 11. The House measure, which included much of the text of the Senate’s USA Act, was passed (337–79) on October 12 as the Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act. On October 23 the House introduced a compromise bill, the USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed (357–66) the following day. The Senate adopted (98–1) the House bill without amendment on October 25, and the following day Bush signed the measure into law.

Provisions

Some key provisions of the legislation consisted of amendments to the Wiretap Act (1968; amended 1986 and 1994), which had prohibited eavesdropping by the government on private face-to-face, telephone, and electronic communications except as authorized by court order in narrowly defined circ*mstances in cases of serious crimes. Sections 201 and 202 of the USA PATRIOT Act added computer and terrorist crimes to the list of serious offenses in connection with which law-enforcement officials could seek a court order to conduct eavesdropping. Section 209 established that voice mail was not entitled to the same protections that governed telephone conversations but only to the weaker safeguards applicable to telephone records and e-mail stored with third parties (usually an Internet service provider). In Section 210 the act added individual subscribers’ credit card or bank account numbers to records that could be obtained from a communication services provider through a subpoena.

Section 216 permitted the use of trap-and-trace devices and pen registers—which record the source and destination, respectively, of calls made to and from a particular telephone—to monitor electronic communications, understood to include e-mail and Web browsing. Court orders for such surveillance did not require probable cause (a showing of facts that would lead a reasonable person to believe that the surveillance would be likely to uncover evidence of criminal activity by the target) but only a certification by the government that the information sought was likely to be relevant to a criminal investigation.

To facilitate cooperation between law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in cases involving terrorism, Section 203 allowed government attorneys to disclose matters before a federal grand jury (whose investigations are generally secret) to “any Federal law enforcement, intelligence, protective, immigration, national defense, or national security official” when such matters concerned “foreign intelligence or counterintelligence.” Section 213 authorized so-called “sneak and peek” searches, in which notification of the target is delayed until after the search has been executed. (The length of the delay must be “reasonable” but could be extended indefinitely for “good cause shown.”)

Other provisions of the act made changes to the operation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to authorize electronic surveillance (and later physical searches) targeting foreign powers or their agents. Section 218 removed the requirement that the government certify in its applications for surveillance authority that “the” purpose of the surveillance was to collect foreign intelligence information. Instead, it was sufficient that the government state that collecting such information was “a significant purpose.” In other changes, Section 215 removed a FISA provision that limited the types of records that the government, with a FISA court order, could require certain businesses to produce, replacing it with a general authority to demand “any tangible things” of any third party, including “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.” This section also imposed a gag order that generally prohibited third parties from disclosing the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sought or obtained such things.

A related provision, Section 505, authorized the FBI to issue subpoenas based on a certification that the information sought is relevant to a foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigation. Orders for such information, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), also imposed gag orders on their recipients. Other sections of the act permitted the FISC to authorize “roving” electronic surveillance, which could be carried out in any location and with any equipment (Section 206), and increased the number of judges on the FISC from 7 to 11 (Section 208).

In other titles, the USA PATRIOT Act increased the powers of the Secretary of the Treasury to combat money laundering; tripled the number of border patrol, customs service, and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) personnel along the northern U.S. border; established new terrorism-related grounds for detaining or deporting foreign nationals or denying them admittance to the United States; expanded the definition of “material support” for terrorist organizations to include “expert advice or assistance”; and created new terrorist crimes, including attacking a mass transit system. Finally, to allay the concerns of legislators who had questioned the constitutionality of some provisions, Section 224, titled “Sunset,” stipulated that 16 sections and two subsections of the act would cease to have effect on December 31, 2005.