Sensenbrenner helped push through President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 sweeping law enforcement | Getty Patriot Act author warns EU against dragnet response to terror Republican who helped draft Patriot Act sees EU under similar pressures to 9/11.

WASHINGTON — A lead author of the U.S. Patriot Act has some advice for European officials as they wrestle with the balance between personal liberties and security in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.

“The cautionary tale is that democracy depends upon a respect for civil liberties,” Jim Sensenbrenner, the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told POLITICO this week. “In France this goes all the way back to their revolution, which was right after ours and the Declaration of the Rights of Man following that revolution.”

He should know. The 18-term Wisconsin Republican, who helped push through President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 sweeping law enforcement and surveillance legislation in 2001, has long since concluded that the U.S. intelligence establishment went far beyond its mandate. That’s why after the Snowden revelations of 2013, he led the charge to scale back the Patriot Act and end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of data earlier this year, resulting in the USA Freedom Act.

“Talking about it in practical terms, the answer is to target the people which you know are up to bad stuff rather than bringing in the 99.8 percent of the inhabitants there, including the vast majority of followers of Islam, who have no intention whatsoever of conducting a terrorist attack,” he said.

While he’s been in Washington for nearly four decades, Sensenbrenner is actually no stranger to many European lawmakers, so he’s sensitive to the higher priority that many Europeans place on personal privacy. In mid-October, Europe’s largest political party — the EPP, which is center-right ideologically — awarded him its Robert Schuman Medal for his work on data-protection issues. The only other American to get the award is former President George H.W. Bush.

Sensenbrenner says the aftermath of the Paris attacks reminds him of the dark, confusing days after 9/11.

On the Sunday after the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon 14 years ago, Sensenbrenner returned to his home state of Wisconsin and received the Bush administration’s first draft of the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner describes the proposal as an almost complete suspension of civil liberties, and a grab bag of proposals that Congress had previously rejected.

Sensenbrenner defends his role in writing the law, and says he insisted to President George W. Bush that the programs couldn’t go on in perpetuity. Sunset provisions were therefore included, requiring the programs to be renewed. He notes that at the time, a broad range of lawmakers, from security hawks to civil libertarians, voted for the bill. The House passed the bill on a 357-66 vote on Oct. 24, 2001; the Senate cleared the bill a day later on a 98-1 vote, with only Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin dissenting.

After the Snowden revelations brought NSA spying concerns to the fore, however, Sensenbrenner joined with other former supporters to rein in its surveillance authorities. The USA Freedom Act was signed into law in June, and government’s authority for bulk data collection ended this week.

“We strongly agree that the dragnet collection of millions of Americans’ phone records every day — whether they have any connection at all to terrorism — goes far beyond what Congress envisioned or intended to authorize. More important, we agree it must stop,” Sensenbrenner wrote in POLITICO along with another author of the Patriot Act —Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) — days before introducing the Patriot Act rollback in 2013.

The Patriot Act was already a dirty phrase in Europe, particularly in the wake of the Snowden revelations, synonymous with limiting freedoms under the guise of protecting national security.

A Pew Research Center poll last year found that 82 percent of French respondents said it was “unacceptable” for the U.S to monitor French citizens. That was the second highest percentage of objections in Europe after Greece. The French were equally displeased with American spying on its own citizens, according to the same poll.

And as European governments propose new security measures post-Paris, wary privacy advocates sometimes cite the U.S. law.

“We refuse [to support] a Belgian Patriot Act,” said Patrick Dewael, the leader of a liberal Belgian political party said on the floor of the Belgian parliament last month, after the country’s prime minister announced a slate of proposals aimed at cracking down on extremism. Among other things, the prime minister proposed allowing authorities to hold suspects for 72 hours without a warrant and tag extremist young people with electronic tethers. “We must always preserve the balance between safety, freedom and privacy of citizens,” he said.

In France, the current state of emergency, which lawmakers quickly agreed to extend for three months, allows authorities to raid homes without warrants. The country’s interior minister said Wednesday that since November 13, French authorities have conducted 2,235 searches and arrested 263 people.

Like Sensenbrenner, former French diplomat Pierre Vimont sees parallels with the post-Sept. 11 American response.

“You are going to see, exactly as you saw in America with 9/11, that pressure is building up to do something,” said Vimont, who is now a senior associate at Carnegie Europe.

Still, Vimont, who has served as French ambassador to the United States and the European Union, and also as the first Executive Secretary General of the European External Action Service, predicted that his country would never create a Patriot Act. Instead, he said, it would search for a “European way” of dealing with the moment.

The reason? The legacy of what played out in Washington in 2001 looms large for European policy makers.

“I don’t think you can go as far as that precisely because we have the experience now — the American experience — that a lot of political leaders are somewhat scared of,” said Vimont. “We may not go as far as that, but I’m sure you will see some change in legislation if not in constitution.”

Nonetheless, since the Snowden revelations and the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has broadened its surveillance mandate to allow the government to monitor phone calls and emails of suspected terrorists without a warrant. And it goes even farther, compelling internet service providers to collect the metadata and the web movements of millions from overseas and make that available to intelligences services.

Back in Washington, when asked if the actions taken by the French government go too far, Sensenbrenner demurs. He says he won’t get “involved in the nuances of French law and what the French constitution allows.” He says only that good intelligence must make its way into the right hands, so that attacks like the one in Paris can be prevented.

“The bottom line is really the effectiveness of whether what the French government has done since the attacks in Paris will be able to stop future attacks,” he said. “And stopping future attacks depends on good intelligence, which is shared worldwide.”

Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter with the POLITICO Pro Europe Brief in Washington, DC. (boreskes@politico.com, @boreskes)