The fourth amendment unambiguously states: "The right of the people
to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no
Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and
the persons or things to be seized."
However, in "new normal" America constitutional guarantees and civil
rights are mere technicalities, cynical propaganda exercises jettisoned
under the flimsiest of pretexts: the endless "War on Terror" where the
corporate state's praetorian guards work the "dark side."
Once served, firms such as telecommunication providers, banks,
credit card companies, airlines, health insurers, video rental services,
even booksellers and libraries, are compelled to turn over what the
secret state deem relevant records on targets of FBI fishing
expeditions.
If burdensome NSL restrictions are breeched for any reason, that
person can be fined or even jailed if gag orders built into the
draconian USA Patriot Act are violated.
However, even the Patriot
Act's abysmally lowered threshold for seizing private records specify
that NSLs cannot be issued "solely on the basis of activities protected
by the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States."
Despite these loose standards, congressional investigators,
journalists and civil liberties watchdogs found that the FBI violated
the rules of the road, such as they are, thousands of times.
Between 2003-2006, the Bureau issued 192,499 NSLs, according to current
estimates, the FBI continues to hand out tens of thousands more each
year.
According to a May 2009 Justice Department
letter sent
to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, "in 2007, the FBI made
16,804 NSL requests" and followed-up the next year by issuing some
"24,744 NSL requests ... to 7,225 United States persons."
The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a 2007
report which concluded that the Bureau had systematically abused the process and exceeded their authority. A follow-up
report published by the OIG in January found that serious civil liberties breeches continue under President Obama.
This is hardly surprising given the track record of the Obama administration.
"Reform," Obama-Style
The
latest White House proposal would hand the secret state unprecedented
access to the personal communications of every American.
What Bushist war criminals did secretly, Obama intends to do openly
and with the blessings of a supine Congress. As constitutional scholar
Glenn Greenwald
points out,
"not only has Obama ... blocked any reforms, he has taken multiple
steps to further expand unaccountable and unchecked surveillance power."
Nowhere is this more apparent than by administration moves to "reform" ECPA.
While
the Justice Department claims their newly sought authority does not
include "'content' of email or other Internet communications," this is
so much eyewash to deceive the public.
In fact, the addition of so-called transactional records to the
volume of files that the state can arbitrarily seize, would hand the
government access to a limitless cache of email addresses, dates and
times they were sent and received, and a literal snap-shot on demand of
what any user looks at or searches when they log onto the internet.
As I have pointed out before, most recently last month when I
described the
National Security Agency's PERFECT CITIZEN program, the roll-out of
privacy-killing deep-packet inspection software developed by NSA
already has the ability to read and catalogue the content of email messages flowing across private telecommunications networks.
Former Bushist Homeland Security official, Stewart A. Baker, applauded the proposal and told the Post,
"it'll be faster and easier to get the data." Baker touts the rule
change as a splendid way for ISPs to hand over "a lot more information
to the FBI in response to an NSL."
While the Post claims "many
internet service providers" have "resisted the government's demands to
turn over electronic records," this is a rank mendacity.
A "senior administration official," speaking anonymously of course, told the Post that "most" ISPs already "turn over such data." Of course they do, and at a premium price!
Internet security analyst Christopher Soghoian has documented that
just one firm, Sprint Nextel, routinely turned over their customer's
geolocation data to law enforcement agencies and even built them a
secure web portal to do so, eight million times in a single year!
Soghoian
wrote last
year that "government agents routinely obtain customer records from
these firms, detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages,
emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries
submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation
data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular
date and time."
As a public service, the secrecy-shredding web site
Cryptome has
published dozens of so-called compliance guides for law enforcement
issued by a plethora of telecoms and ISPs. Readers are urged to peruse
Yahoo's
manual for a taste of what these grifters hand over.
While the administration argues that "electronic communication
transactional records" are the "same as" phone records that the Bureau
can obtain with an NSL, seizing such records reveal far more about a
person's life, and political views, than a list of disaggregated phone
numbers. This is precisely why the
FBI wants unlimited access to this data. Along with racial and
religious profiling, the Bureau would be handed the means to build a
political profile on anyone they deem an "extremist."
That "senior administration official" cited by the Post claims
that access to a citizen's web history "allows us to intercede in plots
earlier than we would if our hands were tied and we were unable to get
this data in a way that was quick and efficient."
Perhaps our "change" administration has forgotten a simple historical fact: police states are efficient.
The value of privacy in a republic, including whom one communicates
with or where one's interests lie, form the core values of a democratic
order; principles sorely lacking in our "new normal" Orwellian order!
In a small but significant victory, the ACLU
announced this
week that "the FBI has partially lifted a gag it imposed on American
Civil Liberties Union client Nicholas Merrill in 2004 that prevented him
from disclosing to anyone that he received a national security letter
(NSL) demanding private customer records."
In a statement to reporters, Merrill said: "Internet users do not
give up their privacy rights when they log on, and the FBI should not
have the power to secretly demand that ISPs turn over constitutionally
protected information about their users without a court order. I hope my
successful challenge to the FBI's NSL gag power will empower others who
may have received NSLs to speak out."
Despite this narrow ruling, the FBI intends to soldier on and the
Obama administration is hell-bent on giving the Bureau even more power
to operate in the dark.
Commenting on the Merrill case, The Washington Post
reported FBI
spokesperson Mike Kortan claimed that NSL "secrecy is often essential
to the successful conduct of counterterrorism and counterintelligence
investigations" and that public disclosure "may pose serious risks to
the investigation itself and to other national security interests."
Those "other" interests, apparently, do not extend to the right to
express one's views freely, particularly when they collide with the
criminal policies of the secret state.
