Slashdot Mirror
FBI Widens Use of National Security Letters
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!
If you have skills, consider Cananda. They're looking for immigrants because they want to increase their labor pool and subsequently the tax base so they can keep supporting their social programs. Also, you won't have to worry about terrorist attacks or being at war with something or someone all the time, you know: terror, drugs, Iraq, maybe Iran, N. Korea....
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
People pin way too much on 9/11. Indeed, all of these trends were in place before the attack.
Anyway, aside from our President, George III, pursuing a war on Iraq like his own personal white whale and dragging his entire crew^W administration^W country with him, it is easy to pin way too much blame on this administration. As one small example, the practice of extraordinary rendition began under President Clinton. Things might have been slightly better had Gore or Kerry won, but in the end, I think that most of this would have happened anyway. It is bigger than the presidency (has a lot to do with national security/military professionals).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP