Patriot Debates

The American Bar Association passed resolutions on the USA PATRIOT Act that asked the U.S. Government "to conduct a thorough review of the implementation of the powers granted to the Executive Branch under the Act before considering legislation that would extend or further expand such powers ...." and "to conduct regular and timely oversight including public hearings ... to ensure that government investigations undertaken pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ... do not violate the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution ...." They also set up a website to discuss issues in relation to the Act, and thus the Patriot Debates were born, where various people debated specific sections.

Title II

Section 203

Kate Martin argued that section 203 and 905 should be modified. She believes that

While effective counterterrorism requires that agencies share relevant information, congressional efforts have uniformly failed to address the real difficulties in such sharing: How to determine what information is useful for counterterrorism; how to determine what information would be useful if shared; how to identify whom it would be useful to share it with; and how to ensure that useful and relevant information is timely recognized and acted upon. To the contrary, the legislative approach – which can fairly be summarized as share everything with everyone – can be counted on to obscure and make more difficult the real challenge of information sharing.

She believes that there was no existing "wall" that separated information sharing between agencies, and believes that the problem with information sharing was that the FBI didn't know the information that was available to the CIA, and vice versa. She further criticised section 905, which required the sharing of all information that would jeopardize an ongoing law enforcement investigation or impair other significant law enforcement interests. Her criticism was that, "over the objections of civil liberties groups and some Democratic senators", the Act fails to discriminate between information gathered between terrorist and non-terrorist investigations. Therefore, she argues, no safeguards or standards are in place in the Patriot Act that apply to the use of such information.