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FBI ISP Letters May Have Violated Free Speech

Posted by kdawson on from the tell-me-and-zip-it dept.

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."

1 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Nice seeing a little resistance to corruption by Anonymous Coward · · 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.