The USA PATRIOT Act was passed in the wake of the horrific attacks on Americans on September 11, 2001, to provide intelligence and law enforcement officers with the tools they needed to investigate these crimes and prevent future attacks. Recently the House passed H.R. 1800, the FISA Sunsets Extension Act of 2011. This law amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to enhance investigative tools and update the law to apply to current technologies that didn’t exist when FISA was created in 1978.

When the PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001 and reauthorized in 2005, there was significant debate over whether the FISA provisions in the law struck an appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties.  As a result, the three FISA provisions were sunset in order to give Congress an opportunity to reexamine them after a number of years. In February, Congress extended these provisions for an additional 90 days in order to give the 112th Congress an opportunity to conduct the necessary oversight hearings on these provisions.

After holding a number of hearings in the committees with jurisdiction over this issue, on May 26, 2011, the House and Senate passed and the President signed into law S. 990, which extends these provisions for an additional four years, through June 1, 2015. I voted to temporarily extend these provisions so that Congress can continue to do the oversight work that’s necessary to ensure that the law not only provides the tools our law enforcement needs to protect the lives of American citizens, but also prevents abuse that would threaten individual rights.