FBI Widens Use of National Security Letters 379
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that the FBI has drastically increased its use of National Security Letters (NSL), which permit it to collect information without judicial oversight. According to the article, the use of NSLs is up by a factor of 100, and the records are kept forever (in the past they were thrown away if the subject was cleared). Deep in the article, the author reports that NSLs were used to collect records '[...] of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in [Las Vegas]' for a two week period, in response to a terrorism threat in 2003. Those records, apparently, will be kept forever by the federal government. There's an ombudsman, and a procedure to resolve complaints, but the mere existence of an NSL is secret, so it's not clear how anyone can complain!
You know who else knows that information? (Score:4, Informative)
Which I used to rent the car, purchase the plane tickets and secure my rental garages.
They also know where I live, my phone # and my mother's maiden name!
Newsy (Score:3, Informative)
Article Text (Score:4, Informative)
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian 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. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities -- still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit -- by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.
The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. 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.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who a
National Security Letters are unenforceable (Score:4, Informative)
If you receive one, you need to get legal advice before complying.
The proposed legislation to criminalize NSL noncompliance, S.1680, has no cosponsors and isn't going anywhere.
The FBI can still go before a judge and get a subpoena, but that requires judicial authorization, and you can fight a subpoena in court if it's overreaching.
Re:Sarcasm (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Tourisme (Score:5, Informative)
That is as soon as you have worked a year after finishing your degree.
Re:Stasi (Score:1, Informative)
In America everything is always bigger: The FBI is much bigger than the Stasi and the Walls are much longer and higher...
The sad thing is that Americans do not even realize that they are living in a police state. This is probably mainly due to acronym confusion. FBI, CIA, Beaureau of Tobacco and whatever, State Troopers, City Police, Highway Patrol, Prison guards... in other countries, all of those things are simply called The Police. There are more police per million people and more people per million in goal, than anywhere else in the world.
Re:Blatantly Unconstitutional (Score:1, Informative)
And even if you do get to the Supreme Court, it's becoming less certain it would actually give you justice.
Re:Tourisme (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to play that game then the U.S. is permanently indebted to France. If it were not for France the rebels in the U.S. might well have lost the revolution and America would still be a British colony. The revolution was for the most part not going all that well until Yorktown. The victory at Yorktown was due in large part to French intelligence on the movements of British army, half the army that laid siege to Yorktown was French and most importantly the fleet that bottled up the British from the sea and prevented its escape or relief was French.
There is another angle on the "debt" the world owes the U.S. for World War II. In defeating Nazi Germany the lion's share of the work was done by the Soviet Union. Certainly the U.S. helped a lot in providing war material, strategic bombing, and opening a second front, but the outcome of the war was really decided on the Eastern front in 1940-1941 when the U.S. wasn't even in the war. The Soviet Union would most probably have won World War II on its own though it certainly would have taken longer.
You will no doubt also want to take credit for precipitating the fall of the iron curtain and the Soviet Union, but in reality most of that change came from within, from the Polish and Solidarity, and Gorbachev. Much of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be attributed to its misguided war in Afghanistan where it impaled itself on an unbeatable insurgency, a lesson America should study closely in Iraq.
"You probably watch american TV and listen to american music too while eating a mcdonalds cheeseburger and a drinking a budwiser."
Dude that is some serious cultural ignorance. American TV is bad, most American movies are bad, McDonald's is some of the world's worst imaginable unhealthy food, and Bud is exceptionally poor beer by the standards of the rest of the world. Not sure many American's, with a clue, would even agree with you on the worth of American TV, fast food or beer. All you are doing is showing the extent to which Americans, and to some extent the rest of the world, is falling prey to American cultural hegemony, due to things like saturation advertising, mass marketing, brain washing and use of military force to project its misguided culture on the world.
All in all you are just further reinforcing the negative opinion most people outside the U.S. and many in the U.S. have of the classic ignorant, arrogant American.
Re:uuugh (Score:2, Informative)
If it weren't the truth, it may have been modded funny instead...
I miss the days of growing up, hating the Soviets for doing the same things to their citizens. And though they are no longer around, they have won. We treat our own citizens exactly the way we were taught that they treated theirs, and that is why we hated them so much.