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WASHINGTON – legislature on weekday passed a four-year extension of post-Sept. 11 powers to see records and carry peregrination wiretaps in motion of terrorists. Votes condemned in fast succession in the senate and House came after lawmakers unloved attempts to irritability the accumulation enforcement powers to ensure that individual liberties are not abused.

Following the 250-153 daytime balloting in the House, the legislation to restore threesome terrorism-fighting polity headed for the president's mode with only hours to go before the viands suspire at midnight.

With Obama currently in France, the White House said the chair would ingest an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actualised signature. It is only utilised with proper authorization of the president. Minutes before the midnight deadline, the White House said Obama had signed the bill.

Obama said he was entertained the behave had been extended.

"It's an important agency for us to continue dealing with an current terrorist threat," he said after a gathering with land President Nicolas Sarkozy.

A short-term expiration would not interrupt current operations but would bar the polity from seeking warrants for new investigations.

Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn status from a azygos senator, politico underclassman author Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of concealment rights. Paul held up the test balloting for several chronicle while he demanded a quantity to modify the calculate to minify the government's ability to monitor individual actions. The calculate passed the senate 72-23.

The manoeuvre would add quaternary eld to the legal chronicle of peregrination wiretaps — those authorized for a mortal rather than a subject distinction or figure — of court-ordered searches of playing records and of surveillance of non-American "lone wolf" suspects without addicted ties to terrorist groups.

The peregrination wiretaps and admittance to playing records are small parts of the army Patriot Act enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But different most of the act, which is permanent law, those viands staleness be renewed periodically because of concerns that they could be utilised to break concealment rights. The aforementioned applies to the "lone wolf" provision, which was part of a 2004 info law.

Paul argued that in the festinate to foregather the terrorist danger in 2001 legislature enacted a Patriot Act that tramples on individual liberties. He had whatever backing from progressive Democrats and subject liberties groups who hit long contended the accumulation gives the polity dominance to spy on innocent citizens.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he voted for the behave when he was a House member in 2001 "while connector set was ease burning." But "I presently realized it gave likewise such noesis to polity without enough righteousness and congressional oversight."

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said the supplying on aggregation playing records crapper guy law-abiding citizens to polity scrutiny. "If we cannot limit investigations to terrorism or another wicked activities, where do they end?" he asked.

"The Patriot Act has been utilised improperly again and again by accumulation enforcement to assail Americans' concealment and break their constitutional rights," said Laura W. Murphy, administrator of the ACLU pedagogue legislative office.

Still, coming meet a period after info and expeditionary forces tracked downbound and killed Osama containerful Laden, there was lowercase craving for tampering with the terrorism-fighting tools. These tools, said senate politico cheater Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, "have kept us innocuous for nearly a decade and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue."

Intelligence officials hit denied incorrect ingest of surveillance tools, and this week both FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence saint Clapper sent letters to congressional leaders warning of earnest domestic section consequences if the viands were allowed to lapse.

The Obama administration says that without the threesome polity the FBI strength not be healthy to obtain aggregation on terrorist plotting inside the U.S. and that a terrorist who communicates using different radiophone phones and email accounts could carelessness opportune surveillance.

"When the measure strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be gift terrorists the possibleness to plot attacks against our country, undetected," senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the senate floor Wednesday. In unusually personal critique of a fellow senator, he warned that Paul, by blocking swift passage of the bill, "is threatening to verify absent the best tools we hit for stopping them."

The commonwealth itself is separated over the Patriot Act, as reflected in a Pew Research Center poll terminal February, before the ending of containerful Laden, that institute that 34 proportionality felt the accumulation "goes likewise far and poses a danger to subject liberties. Some 42 proportionality thoughtful it "a needed agency that helps the polity encounter terrorists." That was a slight readying from 2004 when 39 proportionality thought it went likewise far and 33 proportionality said it was necessary.

Paul, after querulous that Reid's remarks were "personally insulting," asked whether the commonwealth "should hit whatever rules that say before they become into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission, that there should be righteousness review? Do we poverty a lawless land?"

Paul agreed to let the calculate go nervy after he was presented a balloting on digit amendments to rein in polity surveillance powers. Both were soundly defeated. The more controversial, an amendment that would hit restricted powers to obtain gun records in terrorist investigations, was foiled 85-10 after lawmakers conventional a letter from the National Rifle Association stating that it was not attractive a position on the measure.

According to a senior Justice Department domestic section authorised testifying to legislature terminal March, the polity has wanted peregrination bug dominance in about 20 cases a assemblage between 2001 and 2010 and has wanted warrants for playing records less than 40 times a year, on average. The polity has still to ingest the lone womanizer authority.

But the ACLU also points discover that suite approvals for playing record admittance jumped from 21 in 2009 to 96 terminal year, and the methodicalness contends the Patriot Act has blurred the distinction between investigations of actualised terrorists and those not suspected of doing anything wrong.

Two Democratic critics of the Patriot Act, Sen. Daffo Wyden of Oregon and Udall of Colorado, on weekday extracted a promise from senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that she would hold hearings with info and accumulation enforcement officials on how the accumulation is being carried out.

Wyden says that while there are numerous interpretations of how the Patriot Act works, the authorised polity rendering of the accumulation relic classified. "A momentous notch has matured today between what the open thinks the accumulation says and what the polity secretly claims it says," Wyden said.

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Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman and Pete Yost contributed to this report.

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