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Hello, I was away for the summer. It seems that there has been some activity. If you’re here because you heard about my The FBI Has Not Been Here signs, here is a link to the page where I first mentioned them, back in 2005 or so. Back when this idea was getting batted around it was originally because the USA PATRIOT Act was concerning people, the idea that if you even got a National Security Letter not only would it compel you to turn over records, but it also prevented you from telling anyone other than your legal counsel. This sort of sucked and so people fought back. Most notably the people from Library Connection in Connecticut who got the gag order part of the USA PATRIOT Act declared unconstitutional. And you may have read about Brewster Kahle talking in the New Yorker about what it’s like to get a National Security Letter. Brewster is one of the strongest advocate for the right to privacy (and libraries’ right to defend their patrons’ privacy) and even he was sort of freaked out by this. Now that we’re looking into the face of the NSA looking into damned near everything and their heavy-handed tactics to get corporations to comply with them, it’s almost quaint thinking that we were just afraid of the USA PATRIOT Act. You can read more about the idea of “warrant canaries” here. I certainly didn’t think them up, just got a little traction with this one. Oh hey look there is this image over on Wikipedia’s warrant canary article. That’s nice.
The ACLU has made a useful post talking about the Department of Justice’s released statistics about their surveillance activities. Surveillance is up. Section 215 is sunsetting. Osama is dead. What now?
The government more than quadrupled its use of secret court subpoenas, known as 215 orders, which give the government access to “any tangible thing,” including a wide range of sensitive information such as financial records, medical records, and even library records. In 2010, the FBI made 96 applications, up from just 21 in 2009.
Mother Jones had a good article (print version) about the Connecticut librarians ["radical bookworms" in MJ's terms, oy!] who fought the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s a little overblown, in my opinion, but has a good sequence of events. Worth understanding that though the National Security Letter of USAPA was deemed unconstitutional, many other parts of the USA PATRIOT Act are still with us and will be into this next administration. More Daily Kos discussion on this topic yesterday.
National security letters are a little-known fbi tool originally used in foreign intelligence surveillance to obtain phone, financial, and electronic records without court approval. Rarely employed until 2001, they exploded in number after the Patriot Act drastically eased restrictions on their use, allowing nsls to be served by fbi agents on anyone—whether or not they were the subject of a criminal investigation. In 2000, 8,500 nsls were issued; by contrast, between 2003 and 2005 the fbi issued more than 143,000 nsls, only one of which led to a conviction in a terrorism case.
The EFF has just reported that the gag order provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act concerning National Security Letters are unconstitutional. This is NOT the Connecticut case, but a related one concerning the records of an internet service provider. Here is more explanation from the ACLU and a link to the decision (pdf). The decision claims this gag order provision of the USA PATRIOT Act is unconstituional because “it does not afford adequate procedural safeguardd, and because it is not a sufficiently narrowly tailored restriction on protected speech.”
freespeech,
laws,
patriotact,
usapa,
usapatriotact
One of the things that’s so harmful about the USA PATRIOT Act’s gag order, in my opinion, is that the people who have the best firsthand information about it are the ones that are least free to talk about it.
I was one of four library colleagues who challenged an NSL [National Security Letter] in the courts around the time of its reauthorization. We were under a gag order because of the nondisclosure provision of the NSL section of the Patriot Act. This happened even though a judge with high-level security clearance had declared that there was no risk in identifying us as recipients of an NSL. We were therefore not allowed to testify to Congress about our experience with the letters - which seek information, without court review, on people like library users. It is more than irksome to now discover that the attorney general was giving Congress false information - at the same time that we recipients of NSLs were not allowed to express our concerns
[freegovinfo]
ashcroft,
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librarians,
usapa,
usapatriotact
If anyone with more of an understanding of the Montana ILL system would like to comment on this very odd post about a small library, the PATRIOT Act and an alleged “watch list” I would appreciate it.
ill,
montana,
usapa
i just read yesterday about cory’s idea for a web-based version of this sign: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage-dead-mans-switch
[...] The FBI, and whether they’ve been here or not Source: http://www.librarian.net/stax/4182/the-fbi-and-whether-theyve-been-here-or-not/ 0 [...]
I think these canary signs lull people into a false sense of security. As more and more library functions get interconnected, individual libraries might not even be aware of government snooping.
For example, my library is part of a county-wide consortium which provides services, including ILS, ILL and email to its member libraries. We could have a canary sign up in our library, but be unaware that the government has served our consortium with a letter or subpoena. But we can go further. My consortium has outsourced ILS management to the ILS vendor. That means, I think, that the government can serve the vendor with a letter and the consortium will be unaware… I think.
Additionally, the system has outsourced email to Google, even though the domain name on the email addresses give no hint of that. Google can be served and, once again, no one on this end will know. All of our email correspondence is conducted through Google.
We have noted these issues in our privacy policies, but I don’t think there is more we can do.
If we did absolutely everything in-house, including electronic content such as databases, ebooks, etc. then such a sign would have validity. The reality is, however, that libraries have lost control of their patron’s privacy. Canary signs, while amusing, are a false promise, because we have no way of knowing if the FBI has visited or not.
Not disagreeing. These are an amusuing idea at the time (2003) to highlight a thing about privacy and the extent to which we weren’t even allowed to talk about things that might affect patron privacy. I think opening up a conversation about these issues is really important, but realistically this isn’t going to have the effect that we wish it would.