2 posts tagged “national security letter”

A couple of weeks ago, at the conclusion of a reading from my new history of the growth of free speech in the United States, a woman approached me with a question. An active opponent of the Iraq war, she has been having trouble clearing security at the airport. She told me that she is stopped for additional screening almost every time. On one occasion, she was traveling with someone who actually has a criminal record. Her record is clean, but the Transportation Security Administration stopped her, not him. Is it possible that her political activity had put her on a watch list, she asked.

I wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about. Even the USA Patriot Act expressly bars surveillance of American citizens based solely on activity that is protected by the First Amendment. However, I had to say that because of the growth of government secrecy we have no way of knowing what the government may be doing.

This conversation came to mind this morning as I was reading a New York Times report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s "family jewels," a collection of documents that details covert activities of the 1960s. The most brazen acts–the attempted assassination of foreign leaders, spying on the anti-war movement–have been known since the time of the Church Committee investigation in 1975. The documents that were released this week mainly provide additional detail, and not much at that. The National Security Archive, which filed the Freedom of Information Act request that prompted the release, complained that the CIA is continuing to block access to a significant amount of information about agency activities that are now more than 40 years old.

There was an interesting sidebar to this story by Scott Shane that attempted to compare the actions of the intelligence community today with those in its discredited past. Is government more respectful of civil liberties now? I think Shane’s analysis was on target. On the one hand, there is no evidence that the government has attempted to revive COINTELPRO, the FBI program that attempted to disrupt the activities of the civil rights and anti-war movements.

On the other hand, there may be more surveillance today. James Bamford, an expert on the intelligence community, told Shane that he believes the National Security Agency and the CIA are both engaged in more surveillance than at any time in the past. In addition, the FBI has acknowledged that it has seriously abused its authority to issue National Security Letters (NSLs), which give it the power to search the Internet, telephone and financial records of anyone it wants.

The combination of growing secrecy and surveillance provides a tremendous temptation to government to go beyond its mission of protecting the country against terrorism to waging a covert war against its critics. The CIA’s "family jewels" show that it has happened before and that it can happen again.

June 26

In 2006, four Connecticut librarians spoke to the press for the first time about their fight against a National Security Letter (NSL) that the FBI had issued in an effort to obtain the records of their patrons. With the assistance of the ACLU, they had challenged the NSL as a threat to the privacy of their patrons. However, a gag order had prevented them from discussing the case publically for nearly a year. They were finally allowed to speak when the government withdrew the NSL and lifted the gag.

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling declaring the Communications Decency Act (CDA) unconstitutional in Reno v. U.S. The CDA banned the display of "harmful" sexual material on the Internet. The Court declared that the law would deprive adults of information that was protected by the First Amendment.  The Electronic Freedom Foundation has posted a brief commemorative piece.

In 1971, in an extraordinary Saturday session, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the Pentagon Papers case. President Richard Nixon had obtained injunctions blocking the publication of excerpts from the secret government study, a history of American involvement in Vietnam. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post challenged the injunctions as unconstitutional prior restraints on the press.