From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act, without much debate, but with the full-throated support of the Obama administration.

Our hope is that these provisions will be reauthorized for as long as we

possibly can. If they were done on a permanent basis, that is not something that we would object to.

That was Attorney General Eric Holder, apparently not as concerned as privacy advocates were

about the act's potential impact on civil liberties, nor were most legislators.

When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul objected to federal searches of gun records,

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused Paul of being soft on terror.

Meanwhile, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden suggested that the government is secretly interpreting the act even more broadly than generally assumed.

Washingtonian magazine reporter Shane Harris is the author of The Watchers, The Rise of America's Surveillance State.

He summarizes the three most controversial provisions of the act.

One that allows them to place multiple wiretaps when they're tracking a single individual.

It's called the roving wiretap.

Another is something called the business records provision, which allows them to obtain all kinds of different records.

It could be hotel records, rental car, credit card receipts, etc.

And a third is something called the loan wolf provision,

which allows the government to start surveillance on someone, even if they can't show that he's

connected to a terrorist organization or is a foreign agent or a spy.

What is the political climate that permits, you know, what appears to be an incursion into the

Bill of Rights to occur with so little

public debate. When these reauthorization debates come up, there is this line that gets drawn in the

...