Information policy: NSLs, Cyber Initiative
Posted by Jacque on April 16th, 2008
FBI’s bizarre student record gathering
The Electronic Frontier Foudation was able, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to uncover details about bizarre turns in the FBI’s investigation of a former North Carolina State University student.
In 2005, first the agency used a grand jury subpoena to obtain the educational records of the suspect. Then, at the direction of FBI headquarters, agents returned the records and requested them again through a National Security Letter (NSL).
NSLs can be used to get private records about anyone’s domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions without any court approval — as long as it claims the information could be relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation — but not educational records, and the university refused the request. The FBI finally obtained the documents again through a second grand jury subpoena. Later in July of 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller used the delay in gathering the records as an example of why the FBI needed administrative subpoena power instead of NSLs so investigations could move faster.
“The FBI consistently asks for more power and less outside supervision. Yet here the NSL power was misused at the direction of FBI headquarters, and only after review by FBI lawyers. Oversight and legislative reforms are necessary to ensure that these powerful tools are not abused.”
Photo by Daquella Manera. Creative Commons license.
Bush Cyber Initiative may impact public information sources
News posted on Slashdot tells about the Bush Cyber Initiative that was created in January to secure government against electronic attacks.
Various publications are beginning to wonder aloud about the classified operation, called Byzantine Foothold, to detect, track, and disarm intrusions on the government’s most critical networks.
Newsweek says that over the next seven years, Bush’s Cyber Initiative will spend as much as $30 billion to create a new monitoring system for all federal networks, a combined project of the DHS, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
ComputerWorld reports that all data traffic flowing through agency networks will be checked, and that it will be inspected at a deeper level than the current system is capable of now.
BusinessWeek recently reported that one requirement is to reduce the number of internet access points in the Federal Government from the thousands now in use to only 100 sites by June 2008.
It is unknown how the monitoring and reduced access points might impact public information resources such as the Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, or even the US Congress. Once again we face the issue of how to protect our security without disregarding the general public’s rights. So far we haven’t been very good at that.
