[Mb-civic] The FBI's Secret Scrutiny - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page A01

The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document 
marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis 
courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian 
the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed 
Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information 
and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library 
branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for 
three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he 
configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he 
operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors 
browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library 
Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in 
public. The Washington Post established their identities -- still under 
seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit -- by comparing 
unsealed portions of the file with public records and information 
gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing 
practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which 
marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," 
created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, 
originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the 
FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign 
agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, 
transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. 
residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

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.

National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the 
Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste 
after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law's 132 pages wrought scores of 
changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many 
received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly 
pedestrian power to review "transactional records." But few if any other 
provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.

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.

As it wrote the Patriot Act four years ago, Congress bought time and 
leverage for oversight by placing an expiration date on 16 provisions. 
The changes involving national security letters were not among them. In 
fact, as the Dec. 31 deadline approaches and Congress prepares to renew 
or make permanent the expiring provisions, House and Senate conferees 
are poised again to amplify the FBI's power to compel the secret 
surrender of private records.

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.

(continued)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366.html?nav=hcmodule
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