Washington Post: The FBI's Secret Scrutiny. 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.

And Dan Gillmor responds:

"This is how tyranny gets its legs: A secrecy-manic administration that is absolutely contemptuous of individual rights -- except the right to buy guns and pollute the environment, among other things -- and assisted by a Congress that doesn't even want to know what is happening. I'm afraid for the future of liberty. We live in a nation that is tossing it overboard, one horrible law at a time."

I have been saying this for two years... And what is even more amazing to me is that the same gun toting, "give me libery or give me death," folks are the ones who are the strongest supporters of this administration. Somehow they have convinced themselves that, "Good Americans," don't have to worry about this stuff.... It would be very interesting to see what's in those FBI files...

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Posted by: Boyd at November 6, 2005 05:45 PM

Posted by: Kamatu at December 23, 2005 10:57 PM