From William Fisher of IPS News via AlterNet:

With the health care debate preoccupying the mainstream media, it has gone virtually unreported that the Barack Obama administration is quietly supporting renewal of provisions of the George W. Bush-era USA Patriot Act that civil libertarians say infringe on basic freedoms.

And it is reportedly doing so over the objections of some prominent Democrats.

When a panicky Congress passed the act 45 days after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, three contentious parts of the law were scheduled to expire at the end of next month, and opponents of these sections have been pushing Congress to substitute new provisions with substantially strengthened civil liberties protections.

But with the apparent approval of the Obama White House and a number of Republicans — and over the objections of liberal Senate Democrats including Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Dick Durbin of Illinois — the Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to extend the three provisions with only minor changes.
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Amidst the celebration of President Obama’s orders rolling back the Bush Administration’s illegal sanction of Guantanamo Bay detention, rendition to CIA-run “black site” prisons, and torture, Obama — quietly — has held onto another significant extension of executive power. It appears the new President will maintain the Bush and Co. executive orders  for wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping at home and abroad, bypassing the courts and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

On Thursday, Obama’s lawyers joined the former Bush Administration in urging a U.S. District judge to delay enforcement of an order that he issued on 5 January. The decision accepts as evidence “a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004″.

In effect, Obama’s officials are trying to prevent further exposure of the illegal surveillance, which first came to public notice in 2005, and thus forestall pressure to abandon Bush’s executive order.