Category Archives: Civil Liberties

This is an important article:

My National Security Letter Gag Order :

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand — a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly — I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

…

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

Read the whole thing. And worry.

Frequent Errors In FBI's Secret Records Requests: An audit suggests that about one in six FBI snoop requests violated regulations and in some cases the law.

It's only a tiny sample of the huge number of 'national security letters' issued by the FBI, but it does suggest, yet again, that power is being abused.

At the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, we find this major news:

The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) has obtained a copy of an official complaint filed by a veteran FBI Special Agent, Gilbert Graham, with the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG). SA Graham's protected disclosures report the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in conducting electronic surveillance of high-profile U.S. public officials.

Before his retirement in 2002, SA Gilbert Graham worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) Squad NS-24. One of the main areas of Mr. Graham's counterintelligence investigations involved espionage activities by Turkish officials and agents in the United States. On April 2, 2002, Graham filed with the DOJ-OIG a classified protected disclosure, which provided a detailed account of FISA violations involving misuse of FISA warrants to engage in domestic surveillance. In his unclassified report SA Graham states: “It is the complainant's reasonable belief that the request for ELSUR [electronic surveillance] coverage was a subterfuge to collect evidentiary information concerning public corruption matters.” Graham blew the whistle on this illegal behavior, but the actions were covered up by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General's office.

There's more, including a tie-in to the Sibel Edmonds scandal.

Wired.com has a fascinating article about a case I hadn't heard about. In Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You it describes the story of Wendell Belew:

Belew's bout with the Terrorist Surveillance Program began in 2004, when he was representing the U.S. branch office of the prominent Saudi Arabian charity Al-Haramain. Formerly one of the largest charities in Saudi Arabia, Al-Haramain worked to spread a strict view of Islam through philanthropy, missionary work and support for mosques around the world.

Federal officials were investigating the Ashland, Oregon, branch of the group for alleged links to terrorism, and had already frozen the charity's U.S. assets. Belew was one of several lawyers trying to keep Al-Haramain off a U.S. Treasury Department watch list — an effort that sent much paperwork flying back and forth between the attorneys and the Treasury Department's Washington D.C. headquarters across the street from the White House.

On Aug. 20, 2004, fellow Al-Haramain attorney Lynne Bernabei noticed one of the documents from Treasury was marked “top secret.” Bernabei gave the document to attorneys and directors at Al-Haramain's Saudi Arabia headquarters, and gave a copy to Belew. The document was a log of phone conversations Belew and co-counsel Asim Ghafoor had held with a Saudi-based director for the charity named Soliman al-Buthi.

Turns out that was a mistake, and the FBI asked for (and received) the document back, but not before copies got to the Washington Post (also retrieved) and Saudi Arabia (not returned).

And now that document is the smoking gun evidence of an NSA wiretapping program. And because there's documentary proof, the government can't argue — as it has in all other similar cases — that the shady state secrets privilege immunizes it from even having to say whether it is wiretapping people without bothering to get FISA authorization.

And it's not that hard to see why the government didn't go the FISA court on these facts — it's not all that obvious that a court would allow the government to eavesdrop on lawyers working with a client to challenge a government action.

In fact, that sort of eavesdropping — violating attorney-client privilege — is the sort of hypothetical horrible that the government spokespersons routinely pooh-pooh, saying in horrible injured tones, how could you possibly suspect honorable people like us of ever violating constitutional rights so blatantly.

This will be interesting.

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” — David Hume.

putative.com: FedEx refuses shipment of made-up stuff, empty cans

FedEx guy: Is this really what this is? Rocket fuel?
Me [laughing, used to this reaction from being at the space-travel supply store]: Oh, no, no, no. Of course not. It’s… made-up. Kind of a joke. It’s actually full of sugar, which I just put in to give it some weight, but that’s all it is.
FedEx guy: You can’t ship this.
Me: But… it’s just sugar! What, uh, what if I empty it out? It doesn’t really need to have sugar in it.
FedEx guy: No. They would still x-ray it, and then you’d get a call when it was en route. I don’t think it would make it.

…

FedEx guy: Nope. You can’t ship these either.
Me: But… they’re empty! It’s just air. And… nitrogen? It’s, like, almost 80% of the atmosphere. There’s nothing dangerous about nitrogen, even if it were pure.
FedEx guy: They look too much like bomb-making materials.

A local DC radio host pretended to advocate requiring Muslims to be identified with crescent-shaped tattoo or distinctive arm band.

Callers into the station were split on the idea: some loved it, some thought it was too tame and that the tattoo ought to be on the forehead where you could see it. And it went downhill from there, right to death camps.

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of ‘the threat in our midst’ would alleviate the public’s fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

‘I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said,’ he told his audience.

More details and context in Reuters, In U.S., fear and distrust of Muslims runs deep.

Update: MP3 of the radio show.