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!
Man, I want THAT job.
Person: Are you the ombudsman for National Security Letters?
Me: Yes.
Person: I'd like to complain about the FBI's issuance of one against me. I was cleared and they're now storing all my personal information forever.
Me: Sir, you're not supposed to know about that.
Person: But I...
Me: I'm afraid you're now a threat to National Security.
Person: Wait, what the... No, I'm an innocent man! I'M INNOCENT DAMN-*gunshots* *silence*
Me: I love my job.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Just track everyone: Piggy back RFID/GPS chips on every sperm that swims
One the one hand it's useful, but on the other it contradicts our constitutuion. Man I love polidicks[sic].
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
Did you guys really vote for all this, um, stuff? Take your country back.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Well, I would imagine that just by posting to Slashdot you are registered 'for all eternity' in some federal register. So, what's your point?
When we have sensible Supreme Court justices installed, who understand we're at war with an ideology that will never die, national security rules by the president will never be subverted by the meddlesome Congress. Or the people, who don't know enough about security intelligence to keep ourselves safe by electing Congressmembers. We need more justices like Roberts who insist on the privilege of the president to keep us safe, and out of the danger of risky "due process". Too bad we can't get Miers back, who saw the towering intelligence of our current defender. But Alito's committment to the security power of the supreme executive should keep us perfectly safe.
--
make install -not war
In unrelated news, the price of Aluminum today is up by a factor of 100.
.. can't even trust them to correct^h^h^h^h^h^h^hchange the spelling of Anonymous cowards even
Damn those slashdot editors
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Welcome to Amerika, please surrender your rights here!
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
Same here. In fact, I also canceled a trip to a professional conference in S.F last summer. Didn't feel to be tracked (photograph, fingerprints, ...). Better go to china, you just need a visa.
Million Dollar Screenshot
My credit card company!
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!
Only criminals will go to the trouble to avoid being caught in such a web of information collection, leaving innocent private citizens as the only victims in this process.
Like is said for gun control laws, if you outlaw it, only the criminals will have it. This sort of crap will ensure that only criminals are outside of the jurisdiction of legal daily surveilance, thus achieving nothing but ill will and a semi-police state.
If you think this is a troll, try again... When the government invents a reason to spy on you without your permission or that of the courts, they have found a way to be the big brother that we all despise and fear. Never mind tin-foil hats, when they know what you had for breakfast without having to lift a finger, the tin-foil hat does no good.
How long will it be before it is made illegal to thwart such efforts by use of misleading electronic activities, and botnets that spoil the information gathered with false information and misleading information. How long before identity theft is not the real problem, but being accused of anti-american activities is the problem because of clever botnets that have seeded the government databases with information about you and your activities?
Where is the oversight to stop the government from doing that, then arresting you on trumped up charges based on bad information... damn, the US started an entire war on bad information...
FSCK, this is bad!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
There's an easy solution.
Everyone should complain.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I recall posts from about 7 years ago where our American brethren would profusely claim such laws would (could) never exist in the U.S., and it was kind of comforting to know such a human-rights haven existed (contrast: we don't have a bill of rights in Australia).
But it's frightening how Uncle Sam has managed to sidestep such safeguards in the name of "national security".
I shake my head in disgust when I think of the governments trouncing basic rights to protect us against a threat that claims as many people per decade as cancer does in one day !!
I'm not sure how reassuring this is, but keep in mind that most reports indicate that the FBI is fabulously inept at analyzing the information that they have already, and this is merely going to further overwhelm them. To be sure, there are genuine civil liberties issues here, but I'd be far more concerned if they were investing the same resources doing things the old-fashioned way (infiltrating groups, hanging out taking notes, reading mail, tapping phones, etc)
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
Well, in today's present society the first step would be to automate voting, and get rid of the electorate delegates - that would ensure the majority actually does rule (assuming the techonology is implemented correctly).
Second step would be (this I'm sort of deriving from an article I read) - to send the senators and representatives home, and allow them to use video conferencing instead. I think this would allow more "real" people to eventually get elected - and be *willing* to get elected, since they wouldn't have to move out of their home towns - leaving friends, family, and a sense of what's going on locally in their state behind them.
On certain issues you could also institute country wide referendums. More technical issues would have to be decided by the senate/house - which is why electing competent people would still be important.
Last but not least, it might be a good idea to make being a senator/representative a part time job, and let them keep their day jobs. That would keep them in touch with daily life, and also effectively curb the amount of useless legislation that's passed each year. (Along with mitigating the effects of lobbyists - since they wouldn't fear losing their jobs, they would merely be doing a service for their country.)
Oh, and term limits might also fit into that plan quite well to enforce the idea that "this is not your permanent job".
Not that the scenario will ever happen in my lifetime without a nation-wide catastrophy or revolt, but it doesn't hurt to throw the ideas out there.
I think the submitter missed an important part of the article, which is this quote[ ...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. ...]
This lack of respect to privacy is troubling....
Right before 9/11, I was offered a job in the US, but it fell through (guess for what reason) and at the time, it was really difficult because I wanted to leave Canada for the US. Looking back now, the job not coming through is the best thing that could have happened to me because I definitely would be making a quick exit out of the US of A.
As well, I used to love driving to Buffalo, NY to spend money shopping, and took yearly vacations to places like Florida and Alaska, but since 9/11, I have not even come close to American soil. The last thing I need is to be body cavity searched or interrogated. Sure, I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I want to submit myself to a complete loss of my personal freedoms. America, it's been a slice, I hope one day you'll become a place of freedom again, when it does, I'll be the first in line to come over to celebrate.
And I thought the FBI was wasting time on porn cases and such, but the waste of time and effort that must of gone into that vegas data mining with such a wide net was epic. What could they hope to have found, considering the FBI hasn't managed to handle their other low level basic database problems so well. And considering all these false alarms they get as they roust people all over the world. Our street-level intelligence is truly clueless and out of touch and adding the epic waste of mass data mining is surely going to have the FBI chasing ghosts as our freedoms erode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
- that would ensure the majority actually does rule (assuming the techonology is implemented correctly)
I'm not sure we want the majority to rule. The purpose of a democratic republic is to seat a group of informed representaives.
make being a senator/representative a part time job, and let them keep their day jobs.
Nah. People pay attention to where their bowl of rice is coming from. We don't want them paying less attention to their senator/representative job than they already do. This would make them (if possible) even more susceptible to bribes and lobbying.
term limits might also fit into that plan quite well
I object to term limits because imagine you have really good representation, a really good, effective member. Couple years, bang! He's fired. Someone new comes in, probably not as good as what you had. I know it's hard to imagine now, but let's don't force good people out of office.
I think a better start would be to revoke the corporation's right to free speech, and forbid them from contributing to campaigns. Period. Corporations are not people and do not act like people, so we should not let them drive our elections. They are far too able to throw large volumes of cash at election campaigns. They have too much say over how we are governed.
I also think we should try really hard to break up the power structures in the two big parties. There is such a huge interlocking collection of debts and favors controlling who gets to be a nominee that it is (usually) impossible for anyone fresh and different to get on the ticket. Does anyone really believe that there is nobody in the Republican Party better qualified to lead the US than George W.? Neither party puts forward their best candidate anymore. They put forward the one who best manipulates the existing power structure.
To quote one 'Madpride' from another board:
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
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
I eventually had to go down to the cellar. With a torch. The notice was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
In the last ten years, traffic has killed about 400.000 Americans. Terrorism has killed less than 4.000. I'm still amazed how the American public is prepared the give up all kinds of civil liberties just to fight the risk that is 100 times smaller, not to mention that the success chances are doubtful. Accepting a small - tiny! - terrorism threat is a small price to pay for a free society.
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.
Well, I've been living in USA since 1999 and over the years I have realized that USA:
- Is not free
- Is not democractic
- Don't have free speech
- Has more criminals than any other country and put a larger percent of it's population behind bars than any other country.
- Has a cruel and barbaric justice system
- Has a completly corrupt and criminal political system
- Has more poverty than any other 1st world country
- Has an increasingly horrible education system
- Have their own world history which differs quite a bit from the history that the rest of the world knows.
- Indoctrinates it's people about the same as old Soviet Union did and about the same as todays North Korea and China.
I cpuld go on and on about these things but I'll stop here. Now I will be labeled as a USA hater, when it is the opposite. I actually love USA enough to care about what it does and how it is conceived around the world. If you hate USA, the current course if fine and you really don't have to say anything, just continue to support it's actions. That is hating USA when you really don't care what the rest of the world thinks.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
This kind of thing is very clearly illegal under the fourth and fifth amendments. The lesson here, is that the constitution is no guarantee of our liberty. Freedon ultimately depends on the will of people to demand and enforce limits on government's continuous attempts to expand its power.
This will go on until someone who is presented with a "national security letter" says, "Fuck you, get a warrant", and is preparted to fight the case all the way to the supreme court.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Have you seen any terrorism here in the states since 9/11?
Yes.
Antrax (we still don't know what happened with that, right? Yeah, we're sure doing a bang-up job fighting terrorism), DC shooter, happy-face mailbox bomber (that was post-9/11, right? or was it right before? If it was the latter, then disregard it, obviously)
We had a major attack in '93, and another in '95 (IIRC), so that was a 2-year gap followed by a 6-year gap ('95-'01), and the second one was domestic terrorism, so it was 8 years between "Al Qaeda" attacks. Yes, there were the embassy bombings, but putting aside that whole "embassies are technically US territory" thing, those were in other countries, and we've certainly lost a lot of people in foreign countries to similar attacks since 9/11, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's only been 4 years since 9/11. If we go another 4 or 5 without a foreign-origininating attack, we'll be doing OK I suppose, though with only 2 prior major foreign attacks to work with, it's not like we've got enough data points to say much about this anyway, so arguments either way using this information are rather pointless. It could be that the 8-year span was an unusually short one anyway, or maybe unusually long. There's no way to tell.
Well, i checked it some time ago and if you dont have any health problems and can speak reasonly good English or French, and can save up enough money to live a year or already have a job you can get a permenant permision to live and work in Canada.
That is as soon as you have worked a year after finishing your degree.
Freedom or George Bush
or that all-time favorite,
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
The guards would just glance at my passport and wave me through. Same coming back.
So why is it any different now?
>Did you guys really vote for all this, um, stuff? Take your country back.
Do you really think the average voter has any idea what a national security letter might be and if they did the proper checks and balances such a thing would need. Or if they are even aware of the big privacy debate going on? They don't. During the last election, from what I was told first hand, people voted on:
1. Terrorism: Usually "Bush will teach them 'Rabs" kind of attitude.
2. Gay marriage: This was surprisingly everywhere before the election and no where now. Funny how that works.
3. Abortion: The usual crap here.
4. Vietnam: Kerry's status as a vet opened up the old vietnam wounds.
Only political junkies cared about privacy, civil rights, economic stability, social security, judge appointments, etc.
I don't think most countries are too different, the LCD tend to vote on hot button issues and the educated and elitist classes take on everything else. Asking "Did you people really vote for this stuff" is kinda non-starter. People don't even vote on this stuff, they vote for what they know.
Essentially this is your classic "raise the discourse" argument, but one of the nice things of being at the top of the world as a superpower in about a dozen different ways is that there's little incentive to learn about foreign policy, civil issues, other countries, other systems, etc. As long as there is wealth and safety one can remain fairly ignorant of a lot of things. This eventually does bite one in the ass and will probably coincide with the loss of a superpower status as Europe and Asia keep rising.
The traffic accidents of which you speak did not:
1) Cause billions of dollars of damage in less than an hour's time and shut down an entire industry for days.
2) Generally result from malicious intent from people who have declared they will not be happy until millions of Americans are dead
3) Paralyze an entire nation's ability to move people and goods
4) Happen as the result of an accident
Also, please provide a source for your 400,000 dead in past four years statistic. Statistics I've found from 1998 say around 49,000 died in North America from car accidents that year. Sounds like you're pulling your numbers out of thin air.
No, but when you add up the $100,000+ treatment costs of the millions of uninsured Americans who do get cancer that the government pays... well, guess what? Billions of dollars.
I am a full time student and uninsured. I pay my taxes, in full, on time, every year. I am an American Citizen and have been for all of my 25 years on this earth. I have no criminal record of any kind.
My foot is currently broken, and I believe I have established that I am both 'uninsured' and an 'American' (one in good standing, too). I do not have the resources to pay for X-Rays, Doctors, a Cast, or possible therapy. How can I get the government to pay for my treatment?
Oh yea, I can't, because we're the only country in the world where our government sponsored healthcare only helps non-Americans, such as illegal immigrants and Iraqis. I've tried, I can't get shit for myself. I would be more than happy for you to prove me wrong, because a cast really would be nice.
~Rebecca
Er, did you read my post? The anthrax thing was AFTER 9/11. So were the DC shootings. Let me bold that for you: THEY WERE TERRORIST ATTACKS THAT HAPPENED AFTER 9/11.
And I just looked it up: the "smiley face bomber" was also after 9/11. 2002, in fact.
So there HAVE been terrorist attacks within the US borders since 9/11. Several, in fact.
Now, there HAVE NOT been any foreign-created attacks (well, the Anthrax may have been, who the hell knows, since the government seems to have stopped caring about that) since 9/11, but the gap between the last two attacks by Al Qaeda was 8 years. It has only been 4 years since the second one, so if they have the same gap this time, it won't be 'till after the next presidential election that we get hit again. So, without changing anything or taking any special action after 9/11, the president should have been able to get 8 years without attacks anyway.
AND AGAIN, this is all using the previous Al Qaeda attacks in the US as a model for predicting future ones, and since there have only been 2, it's hard to say anything based on that.
In other words, saying "the president's doing such a good job because there havn't been any attacks since 9/11!" is dumb by any standard, even based on the little bit of data that we do have; conversely, EVEN IF we had an attack tomorrow, it'd be only slightly less silly to say that that was evidence of him doing a bad job. It's a poor metric by which to measure performance, without other data sets to support it.
The "fighting them over there instead of over here" thing is one of the dumbest mantras to come out of the right in the past few years, and that's saying a lot. Odds are, we wouldn't be fighting them over here anyway, at least not any more so than we had been before 9/11. Putting the money from Iraq into investigations and law enforement would have taken a bigger bite out of real terrorist threats than the war has, by an order of magnitude, and probably resulted in a net gain in the "loss of US life" category, given how many US citizens (not just soldiers) have died in Iraq. Putting that money into research for treatments and cures for cancer and heart disease would likely have saved more lives than either of the other options.
I'm in the same boat, at one time I thought it would be inevitable that to find a good paying job as a software developer I would have to move to the US. But, things changed and I have a great job with good enough pay here in Canada, and I haven't even visited the states since April 2001 even though I had an Aunt & Uncle just living 4 hours down the road in Detroit.
As well, another aunt & uncle got kicked out of the US when the government refused to renew my uncle's visa despite possessing a pretty unique skill, being steadily employed by the same company for 30 years, and having lived in the states for at least the last 5. Now he has to travel from Canada to the US every week or two for work.
At one time my parents used to drive to Grand Forks North Dakota once a year to go shopping, now I wouldn't set foot in the country unless I was passing through to Mexico or the Bahamas, or on a business trip. The uncle who is American, has been interrogated on his way back into the US on at least one occasion, worst I've ever had going through customs in my own country is being asked if I had any foreign fruits or veggies in my bag.
This is not a sig.
"forgeting WWII and your debt to america from real tyranny."
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.
@de_machina
He wants his agenda back.
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.
Is it just me, or does this demonstrate nothing but the most vile contempt for the citizens of the U.S.?