CDT, among many others, is urging all of us to take action on the PATRIOT Act, a terrible piece of legislation that I’ve written about before. I also featured this Act in the book. From it:
….under the PATRIOT Act, the government now
has far broader rights to intercept your private data communica-
tions—a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which states:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, pa-
pers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated.”
The PATRIOT Act certainly puts a new spin on the word
“search.” But this is to be expected, right? After all, if the government
has probable cause and a search warrant, nothing has really changed,
has it? As all good civics students know, the Fourth Amendment con-
tinues: “no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported
by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Under PATRIOT, prior interpretations of these constitutional
presumptions don’t necessarily hold true. To summarize, the PA-
TRIOT Act holds that your private information can now be inter-
cepted and handed over to government authorities not via a search
warrant tendered to you, but rather via a request to your ISP, your
community library, or another service provider. That means that
should the government decide it wants access to your information, it
no longer needs to serve a search warrant on you; it can instead go to
the company that you use—be it Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL,
or any number of others.3 In the past, the government could cer-
tainly tap your phone or search your effects if you were a suspect in
a crime. But under the PATRIOT Act, not only can the government
tap a suspect’s clickstream; the standards for who the government
can tap and how it informs a suspect have loosened as well.
Portions of the Act are under review by the House and Senate. From the CDT alert:
A “conference committee” of Congressional
leaders will begin meeting this Thursday, November 10 to reconcile the
Senate and House versions of the PATRIOT Act Reauthorization bills. At
this point, it is pretty clear that PATRIOT will be renewed, but the
Senate bill contains some important checks and balances to protect
against governmental abuse. And the Washington Post recently drew
attention to government overreaching under the PATRIOT Act. (reg required)
According to the Post, the FBI uses the PATRIOT Act to issue more than
30,000 national security letters demanding from businesses sensitive
records about their customers. The Post also reported that the FBI no
longer destroys data collected through such sweeps, even if it is
irrelevant to the investigation at hand. Instead, the article states,
the FBI has been ordered to keep the data, even when it is clear it is
on innocent Americans, and “to develop ‘data mining’ technology “to
probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of
electronic files.”