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

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

When the Patriot Act was first signed into law in October 2001, certain parts had sunset provisions.

In other words, expiration dates.

Three sections of the Act are supposedly headed into the sunset in December, and this week Congress

opened a discussion about whether to let them lapse. The president wants them renewed, and so

discussion notwithstanding, they probably will be. Some civil libertarians say the first three

expiring provisions aren't all that important anyway. There haven't been many complaints

about them. Instead, activists want to use the coming months to argue that another part of the

Patriot Act, the part involving national security letters, ought to be reformed. National

security letters give the FBI the power to obtain records from companies such as banks or internet

service providers about their customers. And when a company receives a national security letter,

it cannot tell anyone but its own lawyers. Greg Nojime is the Senior Council at the Center for

Democracy and Technology. He says that a debate on national security letters is

far more important than arguments over the sunsetting provisions of the Patriot Act.

National security letters don't sunset, but there's strong evidence that they've been abused.

The Department of Justice's own Inspector General issued two reports showing, for example,

national security letters were issued for investigations that hadn't even been opened.

Well, you can't get a national security letter unless you're conducting an investigation,

and yet the government issued these letters anyway.

I understand more than 200,000 of them were presented by FBI agents since 9-11.

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