George Christian is the executive director of Library Connection, Inc., a nonprofit cooperative of more than two dozen public and academic libraries in Connecticut.
Last summer, his office got an odd call. It wasn’t from a co-op member.
And it wasn’t from a library patron. It was from the FBI.
One of Christian’s staff answered the phone and then brought him the news.
“We got a call from the FBI, they want to send us something called a National Security Letter, and they asked who to address it to, and I told them you,” the staffer informed Christian, he recalls.
“I thought, National Security what? What’s a National Security Letter?
Until that moment, I’d never heard those three words, National Security Letter. I never knew there was such a thing. I had no inkling whatsoever,” Christian says.
These letters are an extraordinarily powerful tool in the hands of the FBI. Basically, they amount to subpoenas the Justice Department issues by itself, without having to go to a judge for approval. When they were first authorized in the 1970s, the FBI was required to have “ ‘specific and articulable’ reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or spy,” Barton Gellman reported for The Washington Post on November 6, 2005. But thanks to the Patriot Act, the FBI can slap these letters not only on terrorist suspects but on anyone who is “relevant” to a national security investigation, even those “who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies,” Gellman wrote. The Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to use these National Security Letters to obtain “transactional records” from financial institutions. And the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act expanded the scope of these letters beyond financial institutions to include car dealers, travel agents, real estate agents, pawnbrokers, and others. The FBI is churning these National Security Letters out at the rate of 30,000 a year, Gellman discovered.
That specific letter (delivered by FBI Agents), according to Gellman, sought “all subscriber information, billing information, and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a nearby library.
“The first intimidating thing was the fact that this letter made really clear that I could discuss receipt of this letter with no one,” he says. “And the second thing was the good cop, bad cop routine. One FBI agent was professionally dressed, in a coat and tie, and was mild-mannered, and the other one was casually dressed and muscular and didn’t speak much at all.”
Hay, Christian , what's the matter? This is the FBI after all. Why do you feel intimidated by these agents that delivered the letter? This was not Don Vito Corleone's lawyer and a goon attempting extortion.... uh..... wait a minute.
This is another example of, under the guise of National Security, actions by federal law enforcement are fast approaching what the Nazi SS did in Germany. All that the SS did was always coached as national security, for the good of the German people. At least until the German people realized that each and everyone of them was in danger of being watched and/or "taking away" by the SS.
Now, today, the question for Americans is, just when are we going to wakeup and stop this? Or are we so afraid the we willingly give up our Constitutional and human rights?
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