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Obama Is Becoming the Most Anti-Privacy President Ever
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Aug 17, 2010 04:26am |
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| Category | General |
| Media | Website - Huffington Post |
| News Date | Tuesday, August 17, 2010 10:25:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Today's Washington Post announces yet another assault on personal privacy being attempted by the Obama Administration. In "White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity," Ellen Nakashima reports:
The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.
The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.
In an apparent application of PATRIOT Act principles, the FBI is seeking the unimpeded right to request these records without public notice of any type, without a warrant, and ironically, without it being required to keep a record of the FBI's request. In fact, the victim of such a request would be required to keep it secret, just as librarians at one time were required to keep secret FBI requests for patrons' reading habits, also under the PATRIOT Act. According to Nakashima,
...So-called national security letters... which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.
This proposed policy is a vast increase of the US Government's investigative and coercive powers. It rides roughshod over the Electronic Communications Records Act, an historic 1986 declaration that email is a protected form of s |
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