This is really disturbing. I don’t care what side of the political aisle you are on, the manner in which the USA Patriot Act is being used by our government today is downright scary.
I had no idea this was hapening. Any FBI Field Supervisor has the power to issue what is called a “national security letter,” demanding access to information on private citizens. A national security letter can be served on a bank, ISP, library, employer, school, etc. It allows the FBI access to “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.”
There is no oversight of the issuance of national security letters, no judges, no grand juries, no threshold or guidelines for their issuance. Last year, more than 30,000 NSLs were issued against American citizens. The recipients of NSLs are bound to secrecy, they cannot tell anyone, not the target, not their lawyers, not anyone, about the letters. Not one resulted in charges against anyone. Not one.
"The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."
It gets worse. Prior to last year, records closed NSL investigations had to be destroyed, at least protecting the private information of innocent citizens. This is no longer the case:
“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.”
So the status today is that a single FBI Agent can issue a NSL, conduct a complete examination of someone’s private life in complete secrecy, find no wrongdoing of any kind, and then deposit all records from that investigation into a data base for use by state and local governments, and by “appropriate private sector entities.”
The Washington Post has done us all a public service by investigating and writing about this. Now the ball’s in our court. We need to have a national debate over how to balance privacy against security.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366_pf.html