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WASHINGTON -- On the Patriot Act's first anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union is launching a $3.5 million national campaign to protect the freedoms it says the Bush administration has endangered.

"The ACLU campaign aims to promote a public debate about proposals and measures that violate civil liberties without increasing our security," says Anthony Romero, ACLU's executive director.

The effort includes paid television advertising and organizing its 53 offices and 300,000 members. The focus is on policy issues, including lobbying to repeal portions of the Patriot Act that the ACLU considers anti-civil liberties provisions, says Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office.

Sparring Begins

Attorney General John Ashcroft said he welcomes the debate.

"I'm glad I live in a country where the ACLU can criticize me and vigorously debate the issues," Ashcroft says. "I consider it my job as attorney general to make sure that this and all our freedoms endure."

Before passage of the Patriot Act in response to last year's terrorist attacks, police could monitor phone calls using certain techniques. To track outgoing calls, they commonly obtain a "pen register," a judge's order that allowed them to retrieve dialed numbers--but not conversations. A trap-and-trace surveillance technique allows them to record the sources of incoming calls, but still not the content.

The Patriot Act extended these technologies to online communications, giving law enforcement the authority to identify a suspect's e-mail correspondents without knowing the content of the actual messages. Police may also collect a list of Web sites that a suspect visits.

"It was a terrible mistake to extend these rights to the Internet," says Barry Steinhardt, director of technology and liberty programs for the ACLU. URLs "give far more content than a string of telephone numbers."

URLs can often reveal credit card numbers or specific information that a person is looking for on a search engine like Google, he says.

Claims of invasions of privacy online are "baseless," says Mark Corallo, a spokesperson for the Justice Department. He says Congress built safeguards into the law to avoid invasions of privacy, such as a provision prohibiting the FBI from digging into a person's private e-mail.

"The FBI isn't interested in spying on America," Corallo says. "We all take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. These are people who are dedicated to protecting liberty."

Prodding for Answers

The ACLU's Steinhardt says he does not expect the campaign to immediately affect Justice Department operations. Rather, the ACLU wants to engage the American people, Congress, and the president in a second look at the Patriot Act.

A pair of Congress members have queried Ashcroft about the new tools enabled by the Patriot Act. A letter from House Judiciary Committee Chair F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) and Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) questioned how effective the tools are in combating terrorism, and raised issues about their implementation.

The committee expects to release the Justice Department response soon.

In addition, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August to force the House Judiciary Committee to disclose the information it gets. Steinhardt says the ACLU will have to review the answers before it decides how to move forward.

National security information is exempt from FOIA, Corallo notes, but the Justice Department will consider the ACLU's request to see if it can release some information.

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