NSL News
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 National
Security Letters
NATIONAL SECURITY LETTER News:
20080507
-
Secret
-
 Government
-  Intelligence
-  Terrorism
-  Politics
-  Illegal
-  Surveillance
-  Investigation
-  Internet
- Archive
-  Library
-  Electronic
- Civil
Liberties - Brewster_Kahle
- Censorship
- San
Francisco -  California
-  Student
-  Health
- Consumer
-  Telephone
- Electronic
- Data
- National
Security Letter - "FBI
Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses."
... "The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the
web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act
order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the
order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning." ...
"On November 26, 2007, the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] served
a controversial National
Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet
Archive's founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the
library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity
on the site." ... "The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's
lawyers, fought the NSL [National Security Letter], challenging its constitutionality
in a December 14 complaint
(.pdf) to a federal court in San Francisco [California]. The FBI agreed
on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some
of the documents available to the public." ... "The Patriot Act greatly
expanded the reach of NSLs, which are subpoenas for documents such as billing
records and telephone records that the FBI can issue in terrorism investigations
without a judge's approval. Nearly all NSLs come with gag orders forbidding
the recipient from ever speaking of the subpoena, except to a lawyer."
... "Brewster Kahle called the gag order "horrendous," saying he couldn't
talk about the case with his board members, wife or staff, but said that
his stand was part of a time-honored tradition of librarians protecting
the rights of their patrons." ... ""This is an unqualified success that
will help other recipients understand that you can push back on these,"
Kahle said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning." ...
"Though FBI guidelines on using NSLs warned of overusing them, two Congressionally
ordered audits revealed that the FBI had issued hundreds of illegal requests
for student health records, telephone records and credit reports. The reports
also found that the FBI had issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs since
2001, but failed to track their use. In a letter to Congress last week,
the FBI admitted it can only estimate how many NSLs it has issued." -By
Ryan Singel -Wired
20080306
-
Illegal
-
 Corporate
- Government
- Surveillance
- Terrorism
- Investigation
- Consumer
- Finances
- Telephone
- Internet
- Data
- Intelligence
- Politics
- Rights
-  History
-  Audit
-  Vt
- "More
FBI Privacy Violations Confirmed." ... "The FBI [Federal
Bureau of Investigation] acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans'
telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth
straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at
tracking terrorists and spies." ... "Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing, [FBI Director Robert] Mueller raised the issue of the FBI's controversial
use of so-called national security letters [NSLs] in reference to an upcoming
report on the topic by the Justice Department's inspector general." ...
"An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal
records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data
than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last
year's audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many
national security letters were requested by more than 4,600." ... "National
security letters, as outlined in the USA Patriot Act, are administrative
subpoenas used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the
FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks,
credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records
about their customers or subscribers without a judge's approval." ... "Speaking
before the FBI chief, [Vermont Democratic Senator and] Senate Judiciary
Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. [Democratic-Vermont], urged Mueller to be
more vigilant in correcting what he called "widespread illegal and improper
use of national security letters."" ... ""Everybody wants to stop terrorists.
But we also, though, as Americans, we believe in our privacy rights and
we want those protected," Leahy said. "There has to be a better chain of
command for this. You cannot just have an FBI agent who decides he'd like
to obtain Americans' records, bank records or anything else and do it just
because they want to."" -By Lara Jakes Jordan
-AP via -SFGate.com
20070710
-
Secret
-
 Alberto
R Gonzales - Civil
Liberties - Surveillance
- Law- Phone
- Internet
- Finances
- Terrorism
- Intelligence
- Politics
- "Gonzales
Was Told of FBI Violations: After Bureau Sent Reports,
Attorney General Said He Knew of No Wrongdoing." ... "As he sought to renew
the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales
assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting
powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,"
Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005." ... "Six days earlier, the FBI
sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal
information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least
half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received
in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence
committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom
of Information Act." ... "The acts recounted in the FBI reports included
unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which
an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the
FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied
on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil
liberties and privacy had been violated." ... "The reports also alerted
Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI's use of an anti-terrorism tool
known as a national security letter (NSL), well before the Justice Department's
inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005
to light in a stinging report this past March." ... "The report sent to
Gonzales on April 21, 2005, concerned a violation of the rules governing
NSLs, which allow agents in counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations
to secretly gather Americans' phone, bank and Internet records without
a court order or a grand jury subpoena." (1, 2)
-By John Solomon -WashingtonPost
-
Alberto
R Gonzales - Intelligence
- Politics
- "Routinely
Notified: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has
said he was unaware of violations in the FBI's use of national security
letters until an internal Justice Department report uncovered them in March
2007. But Gonzales was routinely sent notifications from the FBI when such
violations occurred and had to be reported to the president's Intelligence
Oversight Board." -WashingtonPost
20070328
-
 Telephone
-E-Mail
-Finances
- Intelligence
- Surveillance
- Enforcement
- Politics
- "Officials
may face firing over 'security letters'." ... "Democrats
and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday called
for sweeping changes in how "national security letters" are issued and
tracked, including firing and prosecuting FBI officials responsible for
allowing hundreds of such letters to be issued without authorization."
... "The reaction came during a hearing on a March 9 inspector general
report that found that the FBI issued over 143,000 NSL requests from 2003
through 2005, including many that appeared to violate laws and the bureau's
own guidelines. The letters, authorized by the Patriot Acts of 2001 and
2006, allow the FBI to access subscriber information for telephone and
e-mail accounts as well as some credit information in national security
investigations without resorting to a subpoena or a court order." ... "The
report, by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, blamed sloppiness
by individual agents and their supervisors and the lack of an internal
tracking system for many of the errors. Fine also criticized the bureau's
communications analysis unit, an element created after the Sept 11 attacks,
for permitting 29 unauthorized officials to sign "exigent" letters that
demanded information on a speeded up, or emergency basis." -By
Richard Willing -USATODAY
20060516
-
Government
- Phone
- Company
- Noteworthy
-
 Reporters
- Free
Speech -Civil
Liberties - Privacy
-Law- Politics
- "FBI
Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game."
... "The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking
reporters' phone records in leak investigations." ... "Officials say the
FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows
agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters
(NSL)." ... "The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are
not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for
phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that
the records have been given to the government." -Brian
Ross and Richard Esposito -ABCNEWS.com
20051107
-
Business
- Privacy
- Terrorism
- Intelligence
- "Lawmakers
Call for Limits on F.B.I. Power to Demand Records in Terrorism Investigations."
... "Republicans and Democrats in Congress called on Sunday for greater
restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's ability to demand
business and personal records in terrorism investigations without a judge's
approval and to retain the records indefinitely." ... ""We should not ever
give up freedom on the basis of fear, and any freedom that we give up should
be limited in time and limited in scope," Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma
Republican who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, said on the NBC
program "Meet the Press."" ... "Mr. Coburn and other senators were responding
to an article on Sunday in The Washington Post about the government's increasing
use of what are known as national security letters to demand records from
businesses and institutions, without a judge's approval, to aid in terrorism
and intelligence investigations." -By Eric Lichtblau
-NYTimes
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