FBI secret records demand challenged by Internet Archive
Posted by Jacque on May 8th, 2008
The Internet Archive successfully challenged an FBI-issued National Security Letter (NSL) in court, states a PC World story. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
The FBI has withdrawn a secret demand that the online library provide it with a user’s personal information. NSLs come with gag orders so that only Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder, and his lawyers knew about it.
Some provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT passed by Congress shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., allow the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to issue administrative subpoenas to businesses and organizations for customer and other personal information, usually requiring complete secrecy.
“The NSLs basically allow the FBI to demand extremely sensitive personal information about innocent people without any prior court approval, often in total secrecy,” ACLU attorney Melissa Goodman said Wednesday.
FBI Assistant Director John Miller issued a statement about the case Wednesday. “The information requested in the national security letter was relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation,” he said. “National security letters remain indispensable tools for national security investigations and permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.”
Brewster Kahle says the goal of the suit was to help other recipients of NSLs to understand how you can push back on them, and he regards the settlement as a success even though some of the information is still secret. You can see the newly unsealed, but still partially redacted documents, here.
The gag order prevented Kahle from discussing the case with the library’s board of directors, staff, and even his wife, he said. “Gags don’t seem to be necessary,” he said. “Gagging librarians is horrendous.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more on the story. They say that since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, relaxing restrictions on the FBI’s use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase, to nearly 200,000 between 2003 and 2006. EFF’s investigations have uncovered multiple NSL misuses, including an improper NSL issued to North Carolina State University.
Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 3189, the “National Security Letters Reform Act of 2007,” and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) introduced a Senate bill of the same name (S. 2088). Both bills are aimed at narrowing the statute by enacting limits on when and how NSLs can be used and bringing the gag order provision in line with the Constitution.
We have reported several stories about NSLs and particularly its impact on libraries previously. Photo by ricklibrarian. Creative Commons license.