FBI ISP Letters May Have Violated Free Speech 117
Anti-Globalism sends in a Reuters account of an appeals court hearing in which an unnamed ISP is challenging the Patriot Act "National Security Letter" provision that allows the FBI to issue secret letters to ISPs and telecoms, demanding customer records. "A panel of federal appeals court judges pushed a US government lawyer on Wednesday to answer why FBI letters sent out to Internet service providers seeking information should remain secret. ... Between 2003 and 2006 nearly 200,000 national security letters were sent out. Of those about 97 percent received gag orders."
At last (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the contrary, a big company like Comcast has too much to lose to rock the boat. A small, private ISP is less likely to be worried about shareholders since it may be employee-owned by people with strong convictions about freedom.
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Especially since they are pissing everyone off and are under investigation as it is.
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This is an ISP that cares nothing about freedom of speech
They don't hold a monopoly on that, most large corporations are like that.
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Can you provide a pointer to a "rogues gallery" of Comcast's management. When I start seeing them in orange jumpsuits, I'll believe you.
Nice seeing a little resistance to corruption (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to see a little resistance to government corruption.
All of the U.S. government's many secret information-gathering departments and police departments believe that they can order executives of companies that do business in the U.S. to provide any help they want so that they can accomplish their purposes, whatever they are, and put the executives in prison if they reveal their activities.
Because of the surveillance, commerce in the U.S. is no longer safe. So international companies are taking their business elsewhere. That's one of the reasons for the economic downturn.
Taxpayers pay twice for the surveillance, once to have what are essentially activities of secret police, and another time as the economy is destroyed.
Often employees of U.S. government secret departments take jobs in commercial companies and pretend to be normal employees, while serving illegal purposes of the secret departments. So even companies in other countries cannot be trusted to be free of corrupt surveillance, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
It is not a secret. There are plenty of books and articles about U.S. government surveillance. However, most people in the U.S. just don't want to believe the level of corruption is as great as it is. One purpose of having a huge amount of surveillance is to hide the surveillance that is really important to those who run things, whoever they are, the surveillance they use for profit.
Hardly secret....just a little unknown. (Score:2)
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Would even that much were true. I mean, that's how French law has always operated (Napoleonic Code and all): the burden of proof is on the accused. Granted, to an American they appear to have it exactly backwards.
The "Bush regime" has a mantra more along the lines of "you're guilty if we say you are, and you stay that way until we say you're not." Yes, Mr. Bush, the Constitution is only a piece of paper, but the significanc
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Oh, we will know soon enough. They will be the first ones the FCC shuts down.
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Two questions:
is a good idea? The licenses for all these pursuits, which are considered a "privilege, not a right," can be taken away — by the Executive Government (such as FCC) — on a whim, without any court-decision. At best, you may be able to get a court-order of your own
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Requiring a government license for plumbing and serving liquor is silly. But I don't want everyone to investigate me, I don't want anyone to drive me.
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Not bravery, just business (Score:1)
I suggest that this move is the company's w
It's not a violation........ (Score:5, Insightful)
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if breaking the law is never punished.
Attorney General Mukasey, is that you? [thehill.com]
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I don't agree at all.
Non enforcement does not negate the law. It does sort of make it pointless to have on the books, but it doesn't remove it automatically.
200,000? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not that there are 200,000 terrorists, it's just that they felt they needed that many letters while trying to track down the 5-10 terrorists they're looking for.
Kind of like sending 140,000 troops to Iraq to try to find 1 guy who is hiding somewhere on the Afghanistan Pakistan border. There's nothing so inefficient as government bureaucracy.
Re:200,000? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice red herring there. Government bureaucracy has nothing to do with why you're in Iraq. In fact, Iraq is probably the most privatized war the USA has ever fought.
Government bureaucracy promotes inefficiency through civil servants using regulations to protect their jobs and their budgets, not through sending troops to far away lands (which is not to say they wouldn't be happy to let people die to protect budgets, and jobs). The US is in Iraq because George Bush, his advisors, and many corporations want the US to be in Iraq. Not because of government inefficiency.
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You forgot about the people who support and reelected Bush.
Re:200,000? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh right, Diebold, Sequoia Systems, ESS, and almost half of the ordinary folks. You're correct.
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So we should do what the Democrats want us to do with union elections and get rid of the secret ballot. That's a real reform.
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Where in my post did I suggest this? Personally, I think this time around the Democrats have the fix in, and you may see irregularities in Republican districts come Election Day.
As for reforms, the system we use here in Canada seems to work well, namely paper and pencil ballots, polling stations manned by volunteers for all official parties, ballots counted by hand, with members of all official parties observing. It's a method open to attack, but is more secure to massive attacks on a national scale.
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well almost half of the 64% of those eligible to vote who actually voted. so really your down to less than 1/4 (maybe 60 million voted for W out of ~300 million in USA)
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Well, yeah, but I subscribe to the idea that if you don't vote (or at least spoil your ballot) then you don't count.
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The US is in Iraq because George Bush, his advisors, and many corporations want the US to be in Iraq.
You might be able to convince some folks that we were in Iraq for the first 60 days because of whatever theory you care to advance. But, if you take a look at the War Powers Resolution [wikipedia.org] you may notice that in order to remain there required the approval of Congress. I submit to you, we're still there because Congress voted to approve the war against Iraq [cnn.com].
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That number almost certainly does not represent how many terrorists the FBI believes to be here. It is far more likely that the NSLs were issued during the course of investigations to determine if the subject has any terrorist connections, and I would bet only a (extremely) tiny fraction of them actually did.
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The list for flying is over a million names. At 200k to 1 million I'd say the terrorists should start their own country already so we can just nuke them :)
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That's assuming, of course, that the one million people who oppose the US government should be considered the "bad guys".
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I am perfectly willing to become a "bad guy" if my government continues to commit heinous crimes in the name of "the People" .
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Recently, actor Michael Caine was stopped and detained for special evaluation before being allowed to board a plane in the U. S.. He'd had to deal with a business matter, the delay caused him to be separated from his wife, who went ahead with the luggage, and he got a new ticket just to catch up to her. So, he was a solo traveler, foreign national, had no luggage, and had a 1 way ticket. Arguably, if Caine wasn't somebody well known, he would most likely have ended up on a permanent list. The no-fly lists a
Re:200,000? (Score:4, Interesting)
The FBI thinks there are 200,000 terrorists here!!??
No, it means that when you're looking for a needle in a haystack there's a helluva lot of straw. Probably some abuse too, but I think it mostly comes down to "We think there's some terrorists in the US, we haven't got a clue who or where they are, but it's your job to find them anyway." What do you do? You investigate any activity that might be in common with a terrorist, I'd be surprised if they could get a 1% hit rate on that, probably more like 0.1%-0.01% which would be 20-200. Now you can ask if it makes sense to investigate 199k+ others to find those, but the numbers as such aren't unrealistic.
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No, we're in Iraq to remove the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction that could otherwise have been launched within 45 minutes. At least that's what they told me.
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The FBI thinks there are 200,000 terrorists here!
I deem it unlikely. Even if counting all the local politicians and not only the airheads in D.C., you won't even get close to 200,000.
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Sounds about right, isnt that the amount of muslims in the US currently?
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Who is to say that some of these were not background investigations into government employees or applicants? People with a security clearance basically sign away their privacy rights and the background investigations start. They would likely issue gag orders because they don't want the names of those employees and/or future employees to get out.
The gov't uses a non-secret mail out form to references and current and former employers for the initial investigation for everything from vanilla gov't employee up through top secret clearance. They send out interviewers for some levels of clearance (I think only TS and higher, based on what the clearances cost), and interviewees aren't given gag orders- I've been interviewed (though not in the time since the NSLs came out) and know people who have been interviewed in the recent past.
It's more likely that
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I would agree with you, but things should never be easy for the government, or its workers, simply because it has so much power, and it seems it is incredibly easy to abuse that power (eg: telling everybody that these investigations are for national security, and therefore you don't have to reveal anything, when the investigation is against your political adversary so you can illegally dig into his/her private life).
I totally agree with you, and have been pretty active in working to limit the kinds of investigations the gov't can do of employees and contractors that are in the name of national security but appear largely to be just because they think they can.
I was just pointing out why I think there are so many, not that I think it's a good thing.
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I doubt that. 200K is much too small a number for that particular scenario.
Only 97%? (Score:1, Interesting)
Everyone's focused on the total number of NSL's used, and the gag orders placed on them. I'm more worried about that 3% that were used, but not really deemed important enough to put a gag order on. Were they really using this tool to stop terrorism, or get info on 6,000 political opponents?
I feel the gag orders are necessary for actual investigations. You can't have the ISP's sending letters to subscribers all the time when they get NSL's, especially if it's an actual terrorist they're trying to stop. But a
Re:Only 97%? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ah, but wouldn't it be more likely that the gag orders would be on the non-terrorism investigations - I mean, after all, you wouldn't want anyone to know you're investigating your political opponents, would you? But if you're investigating a real terrorist - well, who cares who knows about that. I mean, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. And just because it doesn't have a gag order doesn't mean people will talk about it - if the ISP can tell that it's for a legit terrorism suspect, they're proba
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If the cops come to my door without any sort warrant and start asking stuff about "Joey the Nose", who is a customer of mine, I can tell them I'm not talking to them. I can then go tell Joey that the cops came to my door asking about him. If I don't know about any crime Joey committed, I'm breaking no laws by doing so.
Why should it be any different "on the
Classic Corruption of Power (Score:5, Insightful)
However... 200,000 letters in less than 4 years and 97% of them received gag orders? That's just plain ridiculous. It's a classic example of an organization receiving power and then abusing it.
So, it's time to take that power away from them.
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Taking power away is not necessarily a good idea or even a solution. But every kind of power demands a controlling instance to prevent abuse. And the more potent the power (and limiting freedom of speech and invasion of personal space does count as "quite potent" in my books), the more control it requires.
That is the original idea between the separation of powers. When you split up creation of laws, execution of laws and judgement over laws, you should create a system that allows the three powers to control
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Actually, taking the power away is the only historically effective solution. It will force the agencies impacted to re-evaluate their approach to surveillance, and to find a way to do it that complies with the law. That's what happened with wiretapping, and it ultimately led to the creation of the FISA court (the overseeing body you noted is missing from the current equation.)
However, the USA PATRIOT Act's current expansion of monitoring explicitly sidestepped the FISA mechanism for reasons that were n
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Re:Classic Corruption of Power (Score:5, Insightful)
If the FBI writes a letter to an ISP to investigate possible criminal activity done by one of their customers through that ISP, it makes sense that the ISP shouldn't be allowed to tell the target they're being investigated.
No it doesn't - not even a little bit.
Now, if the FBI obtained a court-ordered *warrant* for an ISP to turn over information in regards to possible criminal activity, *then* it would make sense that the ISP shouldn't be allowed to tell the target they're being investigated (and I'm sure there's some mechanism that allows this.)
The critical difference of course, is judicial oversight. The FBI doesn't want to have to deal with warrants and their pesky inconveniences.
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The critical difference of course, is judicial oversight. The FBI doesn't want to have to deal with warrants and their pesky inconveniences.
Especially the inconvenience of not having absolute power. If the FBI has even the tiniest shred of patriotism, it would abhor absolute power, even it's own. So I just have to ask:
Why do the DOJ and FBI hate America so much?
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If the FBI writes a letter to an ISP to investigate possible criminal activity done by one of their customers through that ISP, it makes sense that the ISP shouldn't be allowed to tell the target they're being investigated.
That much makes sense, but the gag order covers any mention that you have recieved such a letter at all. That is, you can become an instant felon just by going home and telling your spouse why you're late (even if you leave out all details about who they wanted data on).
More significantly, if they turn it into a fishing expedition by not narrowing the information down (we want the browsing history of every customer for the last 5 years), you become a felon if you tell the EFF.
While now corrected (only under
Even if it's ruled unconstitutional... (Score:2)
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Re:Even if it's ruled unconstitutional... (Score:4, Insightful)
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But it does suggest that they won't be punished for going along with it, which is almost the same for practical purposes.
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As foretold by Lucas: (Score:1)
Nute Gunray: Ah, my lord, is that... legal?
Darth Sidious: I will make it legal.
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You know that makes sense!
When it's just Lucas writing, he can't do a script that doesn't make the audience twinge a few times. Just like Bush can't deliver a speech without making the audience twinge.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Not unconstitutional on their face (Score:5, Insightful)
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At the very least I would demand that everyone that was wiretapped has the right to be informed about the wiretapping happening either after the prosecution ends or after a fixed period of time, whatever comes first (if you can't find anything incriminating about a person after a year of listening to his conversation, he probably does not do anything illegal).
This would keep those in power from frivulously using wiretapping against anyone without reason, just because someone had a hunch and he looked "suspi
Re:Not unconstitutional on their face (Score:4, Insightful)
Not being able to tell the subject of the investigation is one thing, but the gag order in the NSL mean that recipients can't even speak to anyone about the letters. The only people they can speak to are people necessary to enforce the letter, who then become bound by the gag, and lawyers, who are (I believe) exempt. It's one of the reasons why these are so hard to fight.
Unfortunately, these gag orders also make it difficult to get any sort of feel for how they are being abused. From internal investigations, it is known that many of these letters overstep the Law, as they lack any judicial approval in their requests for information. But as people can't speak out about them, determining the impact these have had is almost impossible.
Finally, I am not okay with the concept of our Law Enforcement Officers being 'shady and sleazy'; even if it's within the letter of the law. If instead of sending letters, the FBI were to pull people from the street, interrogate them, and then threaten with jail to and keep them from speaking about it, would that be okay?
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Screw that. I don't want a "feel" for the orders
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Secret warrants may be shady and sleazy, but they're perfectly in line with the 4th amendment. The 1st amendment also has security restrictions on it by court precedent, thus I think they'll have a hard time arguing that they have a first amendment right to tell their customers about a NSL.
But these aren't warrants, secret or otherwise. They're simply 200,000 letters from the FBI demanding information. THAT'S the point, not that they are secret.
This could be interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
First I work for a phone company. Before you guys get sand in your vaginas, we were never served any subpoena, national security letter, or even asked if we would monitor anyone or anything. We have gotten subpoenas for simple fraud stuff that was going on through our network, and those all came with orders to remain silent (one FCC one related to fraud the rest were state issued). Its quite common that while an investigation is underway that gag orders are placed on the subpoenas or anything else to pre
Distinction between court orders and "letters" (Score:1)
Like many of the people in this thread, you are failing to note there is a significant difference between a gag ordered attached to a court order or subpoena, and one attached to a letter from the FBI. I very much doubt this ruling would apply to gag orders attached to the former -- those orders have been at least minimally vetted by the judiciary.
I'm completely comfortable with a gag order being used where the enforcement agency has first received the approval of the judicial branch. It is this unilatera
Surprise!!! (Score:5, Funny)
OT Canada/US? (Score:2)
This is only peripherally related, but I've been wondering about this lately.
The CIA isn't allowed to spy domestically right? I think the same holds true of CSIS in Canada. But nothing stops the CIA from spying on Canadians in Canada and the same would be true of CSIS.
Since Canada and the US cooperate on intelligence, what's to stop CSIS and the CIA from spying on each others citizens and sharing the information? That wouldn't technically break any laws.
Probably the NSA could even help CSIS, I remember in 2
Not what you may think. (Score:1)
It says 97% of them are requests to take down information that is already public.
Is this censorship? No, as long as the government simply requests the takedown, with no legal force behind it. Every ISP has its own TOS, and it's completely within the law for them to make some arbitrary limitations on your
WRONG (Score:2)
Free Speech and Privacy vs Security and Secrecy (Score:2)
You know, all of these issues come down to the following:
Accountability
In this day and age of terrorist activities, computer virus, electronic theft, etc..., the government (FBI, CIA, etc...) they do need to do their jobs and our Free Speech and our Privacy are both going to have to bend when our security depends on it.
You can't have it all, and certainly for those out there who have NOTHING to hide, who don't perform any criminal ventures, I doubt they care if Big Brother is watching over them.
So, as long
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It's really too bad that there isn't a *UN*-insightful moderation.
I don't think this is a troll, or flamebait. Just stupid and un-foresightful...or possibly totally lacking in a knowledge of history, and how government actions creep, and leadership changes.
Were it possible to have an ideally honest and upright government, AND to rely on it staying that way, then this proposal would be reasonable. To believe in that at this point appears willful blindness.
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It's funny, the ultimately, the responsibility of an honest and upright government lies in each and every one of us.
The problem is that today's political system only encourages people to participate when its convinient for the elected.
The truth is, if we all took time and paid attention to what is being done by our government, it would have to be honest and upright.
But most people like to just coast along and pass the buck, and that's why there is abuse in the first place. Because we, the people don't moni
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Accountability
And how do we hold government officials accountable?
In this day and age of terrorist activities, computer virus, electronic theft, etc..., the government (FBI, CIA, etc...) they do need to do their jobs and our Free Speech and our Privacy are both going to have to bend when our security depends on it.
Why? What if our liberties are more valuable than our security?
You can't have it all, and certainly for those out there who have NOTHING to hide, who don't perform any criminal ventures, I doubt t
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What if you say have a webpage that uses a RED background... Then they spy your website and want to throw you in jail so they make a law banning the use of RED backgrounds on websites and come busting down your door tommorow?
A bit extreme but the fallacy of 'If you got nothing to hide...' relies on you always remaining within the law and that the laws are sane and easy to understand. None of which exist presently. The US legal system cant even tell you how many laws are on the books that can land you in jai
I know exactly what I would do with a NSL. (Score:2, Interesting)
The full contents of the letter and all details would be on CNN within a week of these fascists trying to scare me. Consequences be damned, you throw around that Ben Franklin quote around enough, practice what you preach.
I want to know why there are 200,000 weak minded, pathetic scared sheep out there who are willing to bow down like this.
Further, you can't tell me there are no /. readers who have received one. Where are the anonymous stories? Are you ~all~ appeasers? History will not be kind to us I
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See you in the water board room at Gitmo.
There aren't. (Score:4, Informative)
There is a difference. These NSLs were not to individuals, they went to ISPs.
Cox (Score:1)
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you're forgetting that citizens of the USA have certain civil rights.
Domestic terrorism as you call it does not fall under the umbrella of "terrorism" legislation. It falls under regular law enforcement.
That's because they are US citizens. The article is about how the civil rights of citizens is being violated by the FBI, who know they aren't supposed to issue NSLs except under dire circumstances. The point is, the FBI has begun using NSLs in lieu of warrants because it just makes their job easier. It's
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This post is frighteningly wrong-headed.
All terrorism falls under regular law enforcement. There is no legal basis for this mysterious separation of "terrorist" from "criminal" that we see today. They're all criminals. The only time you treat people differently is when you're fighting a war against their country. Despite the modern name of the "War on Terror", such a name has no legal standing.
And then these civil rights you talk about do not happen because the people in question are US citizens. The Consti
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So what do you say about a terrorist act orchestrated by an organization person who has a position de-facto at least co-equal to that of the head of state of another country? Seems to me that one might be considered actual war, rather
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Historically, the terrorists get treated like criminals, and the heads of state get treated like the heads of rogue states. See for example the prosecution of the Lockerbie bombing, wherein Libya was an international pariah for decades but the suspects got regular trials and the one found responsible went to regular jail.
I see no reason to change this approach, and every reason not to change it.
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