How would Tester replace Patriot Act?

Editor,

After the last senatorial debate I have to get involved. On business trips 15 through 30 years ago I traveled to a number of foreign lands (mainly Europe and a trip to the Middle East — and while I was there the installation was attacked by terrorists (1978)). I also spent time in Washington DC working on a number of the defense and NASA sites.

What always got to me traveling overseas was the security check one had to go through before boarding airlines, military guards in the airports, etc. I was naive enough to think how lucky we were not to have these problems in America and always wanted to get down and kiss the ground after landing back in the states. (Americans were not overly liked in France — Paris — even then).

A couple of times after work in DC, while socializing with defense "operatives," as they were talking to each other, I realized they were talking about passing information they had under the table to another one of our spy agencies. I asked why they just didn't call the other agency and give them the info. They explained they were not allowed to inform other intelligence agencies of information they had; so if they thought that some information was of high priority, and knew the person personally, they would try to make sure at least a person in another agency was made aware.

I said this should be fixed for the safety of the nation. They agreed. I naively went ahead with my life assuming that this would be corrected only to find in 1993 there was a higher fence placed around each of these agencies. This problem was finally addressed with the Patriot Act after Sept. 11.

Now comes the rub, I watched the debate between Senator Burns and Jon Tester. Now Tester seems like a nice guy, but then he gets to the part about how he wants to repeal the Patriot Act, the NSA, data mining and all the other intelligence gathering practices set up over the last five years.

Jon Tester must think everybody else in the world is as nice as Montanans? Sorry, Jon, much of the world is not anywhere near this nice and they want to kill us and destroy our economy. We finally get some sort of game plan going to protect the nation, and now some people want to tear it down!

Jon Tester needs to get out of the land of "Oz" and see what the real world is really like. I listened to "Wendy Price's" radio program with Jon Tester this morning (10/2), in which again he talked about the repeal of the Patriot Act and said "other" methods could be used. Jon, what does "other" mean? Sure sounds like pre-911 mentality.

We had 3,000 of our country people killed; let us try not to repeat that again. How does Jon Tester plan on protecting the nation if he gets his way of removing the Patriot Act and other intelligence gathering practices?

Jerry Peterson

Polson