From W.N.Y.C. in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Ladstone is away. I'm Bob Garfield.

When Attorney General John Ashcroft was preparing a second phase of the Patriot Act,

the Center for Public Integrity got a hold of a working draft and released it publicly.

The ensuing uproar over draconian police powers killed that legislation abhorning.

Call that the frog jumping into a pot of boiling water and jumping in a panic right out.

But what if you put the frog in warm water and raise the temperature one slow degree at a time?

That seems to be the Bush administration strategy behind a new provision in the Intelligence Reauthorization Bill,

signed by the president late last year.

Unbundled from the Scuttled Patriot Act 2 and inserted into the routine spending bill,

it gives subpoena power to federal

investigators for a whole range of information from any broadly defined financial institution,

which means the government can now obtain a terrorist's credit card expenditures, or yours,

secretly without a court order.

But where were the shouts of warning this time?

James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology,

says the slow boil method has a lulling effect,

and the media are only partly to blame.

Well, I think to some extent we all dropped the ball.

My office, which I think was the first who discovered it, we didn't realize the import of this provision until after it had passed

both houses. We did issue a little press thing at the time when it was still not finally enacted.

We didn't push it. We didn't hype it. We didn't pump it. And it did remain

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