Is the Patriot Act simply a revived McCarren Act?

Was the Patriot Act nothing more than a successful attempt to revived the long discredited McCarren act of the McCarthy era? British journalist Ellena Lappin recounts here experience with US immigration officials and notes the connection between the two.

Your Country Is Safe From Me
By ELENA LAPPIN New York Times Published: July 4, 2004

"Two months ago, I traveled from London to Los Angeles on assignment for a British paper, The Guardian, believing that as a British citizen I did not require a visa. I was wrong: as a journalist, even from a country that has a visa waiver agreement with the United States, I should have applied for a so-called I (for information) visa. Because I had not, I was interrogated for four hours, body searched, fingerprinted, photographed, handcuffed and forced to spend the night in a cell in a detention facility in central Los Angeles, and another day as a detainee at the airport before flying back to London. My humiliating and physically very uncomfortable detention lasted 26 hours".

"The I visa was initially conceived against the background of the highly controversial McCarran-Walter Act, enacted in 1952 at the peak of the McCarthy era. One of the bill's co-authors, Senator Pat McCarran, boasted that the act was an effective screen against subversives".

"The Patriot Act revived much of the McCarran-Walter Act. It placed antiterrorism measures in a peculiar conceptual proximity to laws supporting the control and removal of undesirable aliens, although with a new emphasis: as dissident writers seem to have disappeared from the public sphere, journalists have become the new subversives, even when they have no agenda at all".

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/books/review/04LAPPINL.html


The American Civil Liberties Union has noted a similar connection.

HOW THE USA-PATRIOT ACT ALLOWS FOR DETENTION AND DEPORTATION OF PEOPLE ENGAGING IN INNOCENT ASSOCIATIONAL ACTIVITY

"…resurrecting the discredited McCarren-Walter Act, adopted at the height of McCarthyism, which barred non-citizens from this country on the basis of their advocacy of Communism. The USA PATRIOT Act permits immigrants to be found "inadmissible" for advocacy that the Secretary of State determines undermines our anti-terrorism efforts."

http://archive.aclu.org/congress/l102301h.html

Given the experiences of Lappin and those of others she describes, is the Patriot Act an attempt to reinstate McCarthy era legislation?