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Two proposals that would give U.S. law enforcement extensive powers to snoop on electronic and voice communications are expected to converge on Capitol Hill next week, as the Senate and House of Representatives work to produce a single antiterrorism bill.

Both the House and the Senate have drafted bills that would expand the ability of law enforcement agencies to gather information on suspected terrorists. However, the fate of each bill is unclear.

The Senate bill, called the USA Act (Uniting and Strengthening America Act), passed through that legislative body 96-1 late Thursday. Three Senators didn't vote on the bill. The lone dissenting vote came from Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who proposed last-minute amendments, according to Senate documents. The bill was under consideration behind closed doors for more than a week before it reached the full Senate.

The House bill, known as the PATRIOT Act (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), has already received widespread support. After some last-minute amendments, the House Judiciary Committed voted 36-0 last week to send the bill to the full house floor.

Although the House is ready to discuss the legislation, it isn't clear what members will be looking at--the PATRIOT Act, the Senate bill, or a variation of the two, says a representative of the House Judiciary Committee.

"Things are constantly changing," says Terry Shawn, press secretary for the House Judiciary Committee. "It's fluid and almost unstable."

The House has been under pressure from the Bush administration to drop its version of the bill and take up the USA Act. The House bill has less of the sweeping authority that Attorney General John Ashcroft requested in his original proposal, and comes with an expiration date for its measures of December 2003.

"There's been considerable House resistance in abandoning the (PATRIOT Act) and voting on the Senate bill," says Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Technology and Democracy.

However, a final bill supported by both branches of Congress, which would ultimately be endorsed by President Bush, has yet to come to fruition.

Balancing Act

Lawmakers continued to butt heads on several issues regarding just how extensively the government should be able to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

The Senate scheduled more than four hours of floor time on Thursday to debate four amendments proposed in the USA Act by Feingold, who has surfaced in the Senate as the only vocal critic of the bill. But three of those were tabled during debate before the Senate passed the bill, removing them from consideration indefinitely.

He had asked that the Senate change the bill to allow eavesdropping of pay phones or other public communication devices only when a suspect is using that device. The amendments also would have cut back on allowing law enforcers to search homes and offices without serving the owner of that property with a warrant.

In a letter Tuesday to ranking Senators, Feingold urged them to bring the bill to a full Senate debate.

"There has been no opportunity in the Judiciary Committee, much less in the full Senate, for Senators to raise concerns about how far this bill goes in giving broad new powers to law enforcement to wiretap and investigate law-abiding U.S. citizens," Feingold wrote.

Privacy groups are also still rumbling over one statute that would treat some computer hackers as terrorists. First outlined in the original Antiterrorism Act proposed by Ashcroft, any hacking or denial of service attack would fall under the same category of crime as terrorism.

The PATRIOT Act aims to tone that down, narrowing the types of computer crime that fall under this legislation to those that pose a threat to the United States, says Lee Tien, a senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. Still, "the definition of a computer hacker is a very fluid thing," he says.

Urging Caution

While urging lawmakers to reconsider any bill that would limit personal privacy, some civil liberties groups are supporting any changes made to the bill. The Center for Technology and Democracy said Thursday that it has urged lawmakers to pass all the proposed changes to the bill.

"We are facing an erosion of civil liberties no matter what we do," Berman says. "We are not supporting the Senate bill. But this is what we've got to work with."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, has been less forgiving of the legislation.

"We don't support either bill, at least as far as the issues of surveillance go," EFF's Tien says. "The differences between the House bill and the Senate bill are not that great. They both essentially open the door for law enforcement to come in and intercept communication."

If the House now passes the PATRIOT Act or a variation of that bill, the House and Senate will meet next week for a full conference session to complete the legislation. If it instead takes up the Senate version, which House members signaled could happen during a conference Friday, the House could either pass the USA Act as it is or offer some new amendments.

"Everything looks as though we're heading for some kind of meeting between the House and Senate to reconcile one bill," Berman says. "In our view, that is some progress."

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