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US Senate Asks for National Security Letter Explanation
A group of U.S. Senators are asking the FBI to explain a recent controversial National Security Letter sent to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive was able to defeat the request with help from the EFF and the ACLU this past April. "The Internet Archive's case is only the third known legal challenge to NSLs, despite the fact that the the FBI issues tens of thousands a year -- more than 100,000 such letters were issued in 2004 and 2005 combined. But despite the lack of legal challenges from recipients at ISPs, telephone companies and credit bureaus, successive scathing reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General have found illegal letters and a willy-nilly culture within the bureau towards tracking their usage."
Congress has any power they give themselves not explicitly denounced as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in review, and when they get a large enough consensus they can change even that. More explicitly, Congress controls the budget: All the other branches of government could piss and moan about it all they like, but a strong congress could turn everyone out into the streets until they backed down.
Yeah, but you're as far off base as emo kid!
Good Lord! Is that what they taught you in civics class back then? Cheer up boomer dude, The Executive has the ability to simply grant itself powers; as long as the Department of Justice (which is part of the Executive Branch) chooses to Congressional requests for information (and when the requests are ignored, to also ignore Congressional subpoenae issued against other members of the Executive!), no charges are filed, no arrests are made, and the case (and its constitutional issues) never reaches the Judicial Branch, and in the absence of a judge's ruling, the Executive's actions can never, by defintion, be ruled unconstitutional.
(I'm not the original AC, as you might guess. Google "inherent contempt", and "contempt of Congress". It may sound like I was going for +5, Funny, but it's actually been happening for real over the past 6-12 months. Long enough for everyone to forget what the original issue was, other than that it's useful for making the other side look bad in an election year.)
On the Media had an interview (transcript and mp3 download available) last week with Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle. about his personal experience with the national security letter. Interesting stuff, but perhaps not much new if you've been keeping up with this.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan