The Washington Post reported this weekend that the FBI now issues more than 30,000 National Security Letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms.
The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
This is how the Act impacts you and me:
Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.
I've written here before about the importance of safeguards –particularly in laws that pose a great threat to civil liberties-- to both prevent abuse and to allow oversight into how a law is implemented. I find myself in the unusual position of complete agreement with Senator Tom Coburn: We should not ever give up freedom on the basis of fear, and any freedom that we give up should be limited in time and limited in scope.
It is time to sunset this bill that is a poster child for people's willingness to relinquish liberties in a time of crisis. In calmer times, and under careful analysis, it's become evident that the provisions are being abused without any penalties-- and with no evidence that it is providing any of the promised additional safety.