Linkmeister

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I didn't like the Patriot Act when it was enacted, and I haven't seen any reason to change my mind. Certainly this article isn't calculated to make me do so:

"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.

I thought we were assured that libraries hadn't been required to show logs to the FBI (Right. Wanna buy a bridge?), but the genesis of this article is a complaint from a librarian: "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."

I thought we won the Cold War, but apparently the Bush Administration found the Soviet secret police methods admirable.

Posted by Linkmeister at November 7, 2005 10:32 AM | TrackBack