Mr. Chairman, section 505 is one of the most, perhaps the most egregious provision of the PATRIOT Act, and it provides essentially, as was said before, that any Director of an FBI field office can issue a national security letter directing the production of financial, telephone, Internet and other records, period, without a court order, without any judicial approval, and there is no provision for going to courts to oppose that. The person whose privacy it is sought to invade never knows about it because it is directed to a third party; namely, the Internet service provider, the telephone company, or whoever. Furthermore, they are prevented by the gag order provision of section 505 from ever telling the person whose privacy is affected or anyone else about this.

The Federal Court in New York has ruled it unconstitutional for two reasons. One, you cannot issue this kind of what amounts to an intrusive search warrant without any judicial approval or provision for getting judicial approval. That is a violation of the fourth amendment. And, two, the gag order, the nondisclosure provision, was ruled as a prior restraint on speech, the first amendment.

This amendment, which I am pleased to cosponsor, is an attempt to solve these problems. It goes a considerable distance towards solving these problems. I do not think it solves all the problems. It does not make section 505 acceptable or even, in my opinion, constitutional, but it goes a good distance towards doing that.

It solves the first problem by saying that you can get a national security letter without going to court, but the recipient can go to court to quash it. That is a minimum standard that ought to be adhered to. This amendment does that, and I am very pleased it does that. It allows the recipient of a national security letter to ask that the gag order be set aside, and it sets limits on the gag order and says it has to be renewed after a certain time period and you have to apply to a court to extend it.

It fails, in my opinion, in that second provision to reach constitutional status by saying that the showing the government has to make to get an extension of the gag order, the affidavit by the government officer asking for the extension, shall be treated as conclusive unless the court finds that certification was made in bad faith. So that is not really up to the judgment of the judge, and I do not think that would satisfy the court on the first amendment. But it goes a long way, as I said, toward making this less egregious a violation of civil liberties and towards making it more constitutional. I do not think it goes far enough but it is a step forward.

It also does not deal with the fact that section 505 should be sunsetted. Because section 505, like some of the other sections we have talked about, is a great expansion of surveillance and police powers, and it may be a necessary one, although I do not agree with that, but even if it is necessary we should be nervous about the expansion of surveillance and police powers and we should revisit that and force Congress to revisit it through using a sunset every so often.

So this amendment goes a considerable distance in the right direction. It does not go far enough, in my opinion, to solve the problems with section 505, but it does go several steps in the right direction, and I commend the sponsor for introducing it, the main sponsor for drafting it, and I support the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.