Senate moves closer to Patriot Act renewal

WASHINGTON — Renewal of the Patriot Act cleared a hurdle Tuesday as the Senate voted to limit debate and bring the bill to a final vote as early as today.

The Senate is expected to adopt a White House-approved compromise that would reauthorize six controversial provisions of the anti-terrorism law originally set to expire at the end of 2005. Democrats and some Republicans had complained the bill ran roughshod over civil liberties.

Since Jan. 1, both houses of Congress have acted twice to extend the current version of the bill, preventing those provisions from expiring. Without congressional action, they would expire March 10.

The Senate is expected to vote nearly unanimously for the compromise, which both Republicans and Democrats say contains important improvements over the original Patriot Act.

That legislation, which gave law-enforcement and intelligence agencies greater flexibility in tracking terrorist suspects, was passed less than two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But it made civil-liberties advocates uneasy by giving the federal government considerable leeway to eavesdrop on and search — with only limited judicial review — homes, offices and business records.

The compromise focuses mainly on National Security Letters, powerful subpoenas that forbid recipients to disclose that they have received them. The final version of the bill would limit the "gag order" on disclosure to one year, at which point the recipient could challenge it in court.

In addition, the compromise would not permit National Security Letters to be issued to libraries when they are acting in their traditional role of providing reading materials or basic Internet access.

Some Democrats said the compromise still contains too few checks and balances on law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.