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FBI ISP Letters May Have Violated Free Speech
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."
Nice seeing someone in the ISP world is concerned about basic rights like freedom of speech. If only we could know which ISP it was....
Make It Secret Protect your privacy
if breaking the law is never punished.
The FBI thinks there are 200,000 terrorists here!!?? Arent we in Iraq to keep from having them here. If there were 200,000 terrorists here there would be bombings every day. A number like 200,000 suggests to me that there is something other than terrorism of interest ... like screwing political opponents of the Bush regime.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
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.
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.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The solution is to have some kind of oversight. FISA is less than ideal, since it's secret, but there are perfectly good national security reasons for keeping some things that way. With the issuing over 200,000 unvetted letters such as these which typically automatically contain a gag order, I also cannot fathom how this FBI power is being used responsibly and not abused. I am a firm believer in the need for a government to conduct certain actions in secret, but we risk a complete erosion of our constitutional rights when a government is given such a powerful tool with absolutely zero oversight, secret or otherwise.
Yup, the Bush administration broke the law, and congress retroactively made a law making it legal.
Here's your problem. The 4th amendment is typically protected by a judge signing the search warrant, which provides oversight against abuses. Even the secret FISA court provides oversight. The problem here, there is NO oversight whatsoever. That's not conforming to the spirit of the 4th amendment at all.
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?