Bush lie: "domestic spying having a court order. "

When he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2003, Obama wrote: "Yes, I would vote to repeal the U.S. Patriot Act,"
In a speech to the American Library Association, he called for the Senate to rewrite the law to keep "Big Brother" from "peering over our shoulder." Yet when the Patriot Act came up for renewal in 2005, Obama compromised and voted alongside 88 other senators to reauthorize the law, even though the new version had only "modest" changes.

Despite Campaign Promises, President Obama Adopts President Bush's Policy of Secrecy

In his first several months in office, Obama has embraced Bush administration justifications to keep secret key government information. Most recently, the Secret Service rejected requests from two organizations for public access to White House visitors logs. The logs document the West Wing meetings that have helped shape Obama's policies on banking regulation, environmental policy, economic recovery and foreign affairs. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Obama administration, seeking the release of the visits by coal company executives to the White House


Obama Signs Extension of PATRIOT Act

President Obama has signed a law renewing three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act The provisions empower law enforcement officials to obtain "roving wiretaps" on suspected foreign agents, track non-citizen "lone wolves" suspected of terrorism, and obtain certain business and even library records. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized lawmakers for passing the provisions without adding the proper privacy safeguards. The provisions were extended despite a warning from two Democratic senators that the U.S. Department of Justice has been secretly interpreting the PATRIOT Act in a way to enable domestic surveillance activities that many members of Congress do not even understand. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Intelligence Committee, accused the Obama administration of relying on a secret law to expand domestic surveillance.

Sen. Ron Wyden: "Americans know that their government will sometimes conduct secret operations, but they don't believe the government ought to be writing secret law. And the reason why we have felt so strongly about this issue of secret law is that it violates the trust that Americans place in their government, and it undermines public confidence in government institutions and agencies, making it harder for them to operate effectively."