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4th Amendment
safe -- for now
'Sneak and peek' measure would have
allowed secret searches by feds
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By Patrick Poole
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
Civil liberties advocates are breathing a cautious sigh of relief after
congressional officials put a halt to an attempt by Justice Department and
FBI lobbyists to change the federal search warrant requirements to allow
federal law-enforcement officials to conduct so-called "sneak and peek"
searches.
Breaking the story nationally two weeks ago, WorldNetDaily reported that a
provision authorizing the change had been quietly inserted into both the
Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act (S. 486/H.R. 2987) and the Bankruptcy
Reform Act (H.R. 833) currently under consideration by Congress.
The stated intent of the "sneak and peek" proposal is to allow federal agents
to enter a suspect's home to install software that can read and transmit
encryption keys and passwords to agents as they are typed for decoding
encrypted communications. The suspect would not be notified for 90 days that
the keyword-capture software had been installed.
Officials would also be authorized to make copies of computer hard drives,
financial records and other "intangible" items without ever notifying the
suspect that they had been copied. Current search warrant standards require
law enforcement authorities to notify a suspect when entering a residence for
a search and to provide a list of items seized.
The Methamphetamine bill had been scheduled for mark-up in the House
Judiciary Committee on May 24, but the bill's sponsors postponed the hearing
after an odd liberal-conservative coalition headed up by Rep. Sheila Jackson
Lee, D-Texas, and Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., expressed their concerns and
threatened a vote to remove the measure from the bill. A Senate version of
the bill, which passed Nov. 19 by unanimous consent, included the provision
at the insistence of the bill's sponsor, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
Brad Alexander, spokesman for Barr, told WorldNetDaily that the bill may not
come back up for consideration in the House, rendering the Senate version
moot.
"If it does come up, we're confident that we can pull it out of the House
version and keep it out of any final version that would come out of the
conference committee," he said. "It looks like the Fourth Amendment is safe
for now."
The same provision was included in the bankruptcy reform package, which has
already passed both the House and Senate and is currently being considered by
a conference committee. While it appeared that the measure might slip
through, the prospects of that occurring appear unlikely after a surprise
champion entered the fray -- the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Kirsten Rowe, an NRA lobbyist, told WorldNetDaily that her group weighed in
on the matter after hearing about the ramifications of the proposal from
congressional staff.
"Our concerns are primarily directed towards Second Amendment issues, but at
our heart we are also a civil rights organization concerned about the rest of
the Constitution," she said. "Once we heard about this, we understood that
this measure would eviscerate the Fourth Amendment as we know it, so we went
to work on the conference committee members, who have agreed to remove it."
But civil liberties groups say that they are not only concerned about the
"sneak and peek" proposal itself, but they are troubled by how the provisions
were concealed in both bills.
Rachel King, legislative counsel for the ACLU's Washington, D.C., office,
told WorldNetDaily that the bill's language never mentions search warrants,
making the changes hard to identify.
"If the Justice Department thinks that these measures are absolutely needed,
they ought to be willing to defend them in public, not bury them in some bill
where they will never be seen," she said.
Attorney General Janet Reno has argued that the measure is needed to combat
terrorism and to assist law enforcement in dealing with cybercrime and
kidnapping cases. Last year, the Justice Department included the measure in a
draft version of the Cyberspace Electronic Security Act, but it was removed
from the final version after civil liberties organizations expressed their
opposition to the search warrant requirement changes.
Some congressional officials remain wary that the measure might appear again
in other bills as the legislative session continues. Alexander said that the
proposal could be dropped into one of the massive appropriation bills later
this year.
"The appropriations process is a tempting vehicle to sneak these things
through, particularly in an election year, so we're going to keep our eyes
open for things like this," he said.
But he added that public awareness of the issue and the large numbers of
citizens contacting their elected representatives about the bills have
diminished the chances that a repeat of the battle over "sneak and peek"
searches will occur this year. "We expect that the public outcry on this will
be sufficient for us to win this round," he said.
Editor's note: If you want to express your views or ask a question of the
White House, your congressional representative, or even your local media --
about this or any other issue -- try WorldNetDaily's new Legislative Action
Network.
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