National security letters were created by the US government in the 1970s as exceptions to privacy law, allowing the FBI to secretly review records of suspected spies. The Bush Administration has used the Patriot Act to expand the use of national security letters to include surveillance of those not suspected of being terrorists or spies. This year the FBI will issue more than 30,000 national security letters, a number which Barton Gellman writing for the Washington Post refers to as “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.”
To make matters worse—much worse—in late 2003, the Bush administration reversed an existing policy requiring federal agencies to destroy their surveillance records on the innocent when their investigations were closed. Now all information obtained through the use of national security letters are placed in databases and those databases are shared widely both within and outside of the federal government. According to Gellman ‘s article in the Post, “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.”
The data collected through a national security letter includes where a target works, lives, spends money, invests, travels, who she associates with, how much she gambles, what she searches for and reads on the web, and who she telephones or emails. The content of her telephone calls or emails are not subject to collection.
In the past, the FBI had to demonstrate “specific and articulable” reasons for the surveillance; under Bush’s changes, the agency need only declare that the records are “sought for” or “relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
The national security letter itself is secret, so it’s no surprise that no allegations of misuse have arisen mostly because tangential targets of an investigation are never notified. Former representative Bob Barr (R-Georgia) told the Post that “the abuse is in the power itself.”
“As a conservative, I really resent an administration that calls itself conservative taking the position that the burden is on the citizen to show the government has abused power, and otherwise shut up and comply.”
At the same time that the Bush administration reversed the policy of destroying records of the innocent upon the close of an investigation, then attorney general John Ashcroft directed the FBI to implement data mining technology to extensively examine links between people in the agency’s database. According to Gellman ‘s article in the Post, “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.”
This is just the sort of toxic environment that encourages tyranny to sprout and take root.
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