The American people should be plenty worried when a federal agency has the power to secretly creep about in the electronic lives of ordinary citizens without warrants or even reasonable suspicion they broke a law. It’s because of the anti-liberty USA Patriot Act, and even people who have nothing to hide should fear the Patriot Act’s tentacles. Congress should drastically rein in this beast.

A Washington Post story published in The Journal Gazette on Monday showed just how diabolical the Patriot Act is. The story explained how FBI field supervisors can issue “national security letters” demanding information without need of a grand jury, a judge or prosecutor. There’s nothing that requires that the facts gathered in the letter be reviewed by the Justice Department or Congress. The FBI sends out more than 30,000 of these letters a year, and the Bush administration doesn’t seem to be concerned by the almost unimaginable scope of these letters.

“The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports,” the Post found. “The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.”

If overly complicated regulations hamstrung intelligence before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Patriot Act, as witnessed by the use of the letters, has the opposite effect: nearly unfettered access by the FBI to information without oversight.

Last summer, the FBI used a national security letter to compel Library Connection, a Connecticut-based cooperative of libraries that share an automated system, to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. The company is challenging the FBI’s demand in a lawsuit being argued in a federal appeals court.

The fear of the government snooping in the electronic lives of Americans isn’t just coming from the left, nor is the distrust of its motives the province of kooky conspiracy theorists. It says a lot about the depth of doubts about national security letters when Georgia Rep. Bob Barr Jr., a devoted conservative and former CIA analyst, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce complained to the Senate in early October about the FBI possibly sharing customer data with other agencies and the burdensome cost of compliance.

The Justice Department has misleadingly touted the fact that there has been no substantiated complaint that the act was misused. Because the law allows the FBI to search a person’s library use record without notifying the person – and indeed makes it a crime for anyone to report the FBI conducted the search – how can anyone know to file a complaint?

Congress is set to renew several sections of the Patriot Act due to expire soon. It’s clear that provisions of the act are too perverse for a society that purports to protect the privacy of citizens from unreasonable searches. Some might be cheered that bills before the House and Senate do allow a judge to modify national security letters, something seen as a way to mollify business interests.

But the Patriot Act needs more than tweaks. At the very least, the law should require that any government agent wanting to search records get a warrant signed by a judge – just as the Constitution demands.