Who’s that under my bed?
The Washington Post reveals today that the FBI has vastly increased its surveillance of ordinary Americans, thanks to the (Un)Patriot Act:
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.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. 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….
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau’s new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect — a single telephone call, for example — may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe 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.
In the process of renewing this abomidable act, Congress is about to make it more draconian:
The House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. The House would also impose a prison term for breach of secrecy.
There is absolutely no oversight, no control over whose information the FBI can or cannot seize. There is no need to show any reasonable cause. Ask and ye shall receive:
“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….”
To establish the “relevance” of the information they seek, agents face a test so basic it is hard to come up with a plausible way to fail. A model request for a supervisor’s signature, according to internal FBI guidelines, offers this one-sentence suggestion: “This subscriber information is being requested to determine the individuals or entities that the subject has been in contact with during the past six months.”
This dramatic loss of freedom may not have had any value in investigating terrorism:
As the Justice Department prepared congressional testimony this year, FBI headquarters searched for examples that would show how expanded surveillance powers made a difference. Michael Mason, who runs the Washington field office and has the rank of assistant FBI director, found no ready answer.
“I’d love to have a made-for-Hollywood story, but I don’t have one,” Mason said. “I am not even sure such an example exists.”
Remember, once the information is in a government database, it’s there forever, to be scrutinized again and again, and again, with no limits of any kind:
The same order directed the FBI to develop “data mining” technology to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files. According to an FBI status report, the bureau’s office of intelligence began operating in January 2004 a new Investigative Data Warehouse, based on the same Oracle technology used by the CIA. The CIA is generally forbidden to keep such files on Americans.
Data mining intensifies the impact of national security letters, because anyone’s personal files can be scrutinized again and again without a fresh need to establish relevance.
The information is then merged with other information in comercial databanks to keep track of what you but, where you eat, and where you drink your coffee.
As an example of the dangers of this growing database, in one of innumerable operations, the government obtained information about every visitor to Las Vegas over two weeks, about 1 million people!
What happened in Vegas stayed in federal data banks [forever]. Under Ashcroft’s revised policy, none of the information has been purged. For every visitor, Breinholt said, “the record of the Las Vegas hotel room would still exist.”
Grigg’s operation found no suspect, and the orange alert ended on Jan. 10, 2004.
The FBI even uses Patriot Act National Security Letters to demand information they have no legal right to. It’s up to the recipient, of whom absolute secrecy is demanded, to fight this illegal request. When a university did fight such a request, the FBI threatened the school administrator and got the inormation illegallly. Of course, under Patriot Act secrecy, that person can’t reveal what the thugs did.
This article is another illustration that traditional American rights and freddoms simply no longer exist. The President can order any American locked up forever, with no limits whatsoever, and the FBI can demand and get immense amounts of information on every one of us and milk it forever. Of course they will soon use it to blackmail critics, as the FBI has historically done.
Add comment November 6th, 2005