From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, Congress reauthorized for another year, three key surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act said to expire.

Also last week, we spoke with Shane Harris, author of The Watchers, the Rise of America's surveillance state,

who noted that the laws that governed data collection prior to the Patriot Act

were a response to Johnson and Nixon era abuses when government spied on war protesters.

But these were laws that were written in a time when there were comparatively few ways to actually

gather data, tapping a phone,

using a satellite.

In the digital age, he says we're drowning in unconnected data dots, and our focus should be

on connecting them.

So I concluded that we need to have our laws focus not so much on the collection and the acquisition

of data, but on setting rules

and procedures for what the government actually does with those databases.

Harris told us this week that the three newly extended provisions of the Patriot Act will

contribute to a flood of dots, but will do little to connect them.

One is the lone wolf terrorist provision. This allows the government to basically start monitoring someone who is not known to be an agent of a foreign power or a member of a

terrorist organization. The records provision allows them to go on continuing to collect

business records, financial records, potentially library records. And then the third provision is

for what's called roving wiretaps,

which allows the government to monitor an individual, regardless of whether he's using a cell phone

or switching between cell phones. They can follow him from one phone to the next.

Was there any attempt in the reauthorization to rein in or adjust any of these provisions?

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