UNTIL this summer, Susan Berland, a member of the Huntington Town Board, said that the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the possibility that it was infringing on people's basic rights was not an issue for the board.
But she said that for two or three months, town board members received hundreds of e-mails and telephone calls from people who lobbied them to take a stand against the Patriot Act's perceived encroachments on civil liberties.
''They wanted us to do something about this and to send a message to Congress,'' Ms. Berland said.
On Sept. 14, the Huntington Town Board voted 3-1, with one abstention, to pass a resolution saying certain provisions of the Patriot Act ''pose a threat to fundamental rights and liberties of the residents of our town.'' The resolution has zero legal impact, but the group that was behind the lobbying effort, the Suffolk Bill of Rights Defense Campaign, hailed it as a victory in a nationwide grassroots campaign. The aim is to persuade Congress to change the law when certain provisions of it expire at the end of next year. The Patriot Act was passed about six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.
The various groups in the grassroots campaign have convinced four states -- Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont -- and more than 350 municipalities nationwide to adopt resolutions critical of provisions of the act, according to Jared Feuer, secretary of the Suffolk Bill of Rights Defense Campaign. He said the list included one other Long Island municipality, the Town of North Hempstead, which passed its resolution last Dec. 16.
Mr. Feuer, who is also executive director of the Suffolk office of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the group's next goal was to convince the Suffolk County Legislature to pass a similar resolution. After that, he said, they have their eyes set on the State Legislature.
Vivian Viloria-Fisher, a Democratic county legislator from Setauket, said a sense-of-the-Legislature resolution she introduced about a month ago calling for a revision of the Patriot Act was defeated in committee after Republicans who control the body accused her of playing partisan politics.
''It was a knee-jerk reaction,'' she said of the defeat.. ''This is not a partisan issue. I hope there will be such a groundswell of bipartisan national outrage over the Patriot Act that it will be changed.''
Ms. Berland said the members of the campaign who came to her office about a month ago ''spoke of Fourth Amendment issues, that people could be held without the right to counsel and without being seen by a judge.''
''And they focused on gaining access to documents from a person's job, his banking institution and library records, and that whoever is supplying this material is not allowed to tell you that you are being investigated,'' she said. ''If you take out books, they want to know what books you took out, and they want to trace what sites you see on the Internet.''
Marlene Budd, the town board member who abstained, said she chose not to take a position because the issue is federal, not local, and ''the town didn't take a survey to learn what the views of the residents are on this issue.''
''There are some issues like clean water that everyone agrees on, but the Patriot Act is not something you can get a consensus on,'' said Ms. Budd, whose husband, Steve Israel, is a Democratic member of Congress. ''So for the town to say that this is the sense of town residents -- this is a sense of the town board.''
Mark Corallo, director of public affairs for the Department of Justice, said ''the only thing that has changed'' under the Patriot Act is that information may now be shared between the intelligence community and law enforcement.
He acknowledged that the law permits law enforcement officers to ask a federal judge for a warrant to obtain business records and to learn the name of library books a person withdraws. But he stressed that the warrant was issued only ''to protect against foreign spying and foreign terrorism, not domestic terrorism or criminal activity.''
He said that before the Patriot Act was adopted that same information could have been obtained with a grand jury subpoena, and that the prohibition against telling someone that his records have been seized is ''nothing new in American law.''
Mark A. Capodanno, a Republican and the only member of the Huntington Town Board to vote against the resolution, said the Patriot Act ''allows the country to address a number of issues in combating terrorism, and since it has been in effect I have not had a reason to want to change it. Your rights are not going to be infringed upon unless there is a reason.''
''This is a federal issue and members of the Justice Department and the Pentagon should be addressing whether it is working and not a local town board,'' he added. ''We have not had one act of terrorism on U.S. soil. So from the perspective of protecting American freedom and rights, we have been very successful since 9/11.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: October 3, 2004
****************************************
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
October 3, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 14LI; Column 5; Long Island Weekly Desk; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 827 words
HEADLINE: Patriot Act Becomes A Huntington Issue
BYLINE: By STEWART AIN