During the course of his campaign, Senator Kerry said that in his first 100 days as President he wants to end the era of John Ashcroft. JOHN KERRY has promised to strengthen terrorism laws that work, strengthen money laundering laws to end funds for terrorists, improve information gathering and protect the basic rights and liberties of all of our citizens.

Senator Kerry and I support the SAFE Act, this bipartisan effort to reform the PATRIOT Act. Here are several of the most important provisions: It will protect innocent people from Government snooping by eliminating John Doe roving wiretaps, which do not identify the person or place being tapped. It requires warrants for roving wiretaps to identify either the target [Page: S4166]
of the wiretap or the places to be tapped. So we say to the Government, if they are going to intercept my conversations at unspecified locations, they must say to the court that they are going after this particular person. They cannot have a wiretap that might sweep up the conversations of my family, my business, my church, whatever it happens to be, without specifically saying to the court, this is the person that we want to wiretap, or this is the phone, this is the place that we want to wiretap. That specificity has always been part of the law. To get away from John Doe roving wiretaps, which allow the Government to just swoop in and collect information and then take a look at it to see if there is anything there of concern, goes way beyond the authority needed to protect America.

This SAFE Act will also impose limits on the Government's ability to carry out what are called sneak-and-peek searches by requiring that immediate notice of a search be given unless the notice would endanger a person's life or physical safety, or result in flight from prosecution or the destruction