Of Course, If You're Not Doing Anything Illegal, You Have Nothing To Worry About
Published by BG on Thursday, June 14, 2007 at 12:37 PM.WP: FBI finds it overstepped in collecting data - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com
FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors and outside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL.
Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, requiring only that the bureau certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
The change -- combined with national anxiety about another domestic terrorist event -- led to an explosive growth in the use of the letters.
Sorry America, all this data we've been collecting on you and your neighbor? Let's just chalk that up to a misunderstanding of procedure and paperwork. We're really not trying to spy on you, it's just happening by accident. Our bad! We promise we'll do better from now on, honest!
Again and again it bears repeating - any time the government legalizes breaking through your expectation of privacy or restricting your civil liberties, they'll do it, they'll abuse it, and they'll chalk it all up to the crazy people who want to do you harm.
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