But before commenting on the specifics of the PATRIOT Act, I would be derelict if I did not mention that the majority party in this House and the Bush administration have really been derelict by not dealing more directly with the threats that we face. The biggest threats we face are sabotage, bombings in our mass transit systems, sabotage of our chemical farms, our nuclear plants that could kill thousands of people, yet we do not see funds to deal with this.

It is easy to be demagogic. The Bush administration does not want to throw money at the problem; they want to throw rhetoric at the problem. So we have the PATRIOT Act. I wish we had real measures to protect our mass transit systems, to protect our vulnerable infrastructure, to protect us against what happened in London again this morning.

The PATRIOT Act was an attempt to do several things, some of which were very necessary. Breaking down the wall between intelligence and police information was very necessary and was in the PATRIOT Act and is not before us today because most of the PATRIOT Act is not before us today. Most of the PATRIOT Act is permanentized. It is permanent law. But when we are expanding police powers and when we are expanding surveillance powers, the power of government to pry into the private affairs, the books, the records, the medical histories of individual citizens, sometimes it may be necessary for security to do so. But it endangers liberty, and that has to be balanced. We should always be nervous about expanding police and surveillance powers, and that is one of the greatest weaknesses of this bill.

We were only able to pass the PATRIOT Act 4 years ago because most, not all but most of the sections of the PATRIOT Act that expanded the powers of the police to pry into the privacy of ordinary Americans, to go into their home, into their papers, into their Internet records, their telephone records, their bank records, were sunsetted.

So what? What is the point of sunsetting? It means that every 4 years at least Congress has to look at that again, has to revisit it, has to have oversight and determine whether those powers are being abused. Mr. Sensenbrenner says they are not being abused. He knows. The Justice Department said so. They said, We are not abusing it. Glad to hear it. But every 4 years we should have to look into it and ask are these powers being abused? Should it be fine tuned? Should they be narrowed? Have we made the right balance between security and liberty?

This bill eliminates those sunsets, except for two, which it makes 10-year sunsets.

We have had 4 years since the PATRIOT Act was enacted. We did not do any oversight in this House until 6 months ago. Why? Because of the sunset. If it had not been for the sunsetting, we would not have had the oversight. We must have that oversight and we should have had all of these things sunsetted, continued another 4 years, another 4 years.

Secondly, Members have heard about section 215. The powers granted in section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which is hardly modified by this bill, to look into anybody's library and medical records in secret and not tell anybody that they have done so, not tell the person whose records are pried into is a very disturbing invasion of liberty, and amendments to limit it were not made in order. Section 505 of the bill, which enables any FBI agent, any FBI field office director, to issue a national security letter to let them go and see their Internet records, their phone records, and so forth without even going to a judge and telling them it is relevant to a national security investigation is wrong, and it was declared unconstitutional by a federal court. The amendments to make this constitutional, to say that they have to at least allow for judicial review and to sunset the gag order were not made in order.

This should be defeated for those reasons because it is not a proper balance between security and liberty.