ALAWON: American Library Association Washington Office Newsline Volume 14, Number 109 November 8, 2005 In This Issue: Urge PATRIOT Conferees to Limit Unrestricted FBI Powers to Demand Private Data Urge YES Vote on "Motion to Instruct" On Sunday, a front-page article in The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366.html) shed new light on provisions in the PATRIOT Act that authorize FBI agents to issue, with no judicial approval, demands for sensitive records. The power to issue National Security Letters was not included in the sunset clause of the PATRIOT Act and therefore have received limited attention so far from Members of Congress. You can help change that, by calling your elected representatives today and urging them to sunset National Security Letters until they can be brought under control. Sunday's article revealed that, since the PATRIOT Act changes, the FBI has been issuing "more than 30,000 national security letters a year - a hundredfold increase over historic norms." The article 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." Two crucial decision points are coming up this week: 1. House negotiators (conferees) on the PATRIOT Act reauthorization will be named tomorrow (Wednesday, November 9). (A list of likely conferees is at the bottom of this email.) When House conferees are named, a motion will be offered to "instruct" them to adopt provisions limiting the PATRIOT Act's more intrusive powers. The exact wording of the motion is not settled, but it is an important opportunity for House members to reflect continuing public unease with the unrestrained government powers of the PATRIOT Act. ACTION: Call your member of Congress in the House of Representatives and urge him or her to vote YES on the "motion to instruct." Capitol Hill switchboard number is: 202-224-3121. 2. The Senate and House conferees may meet on Thursday to begin hammering out the details of the final PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill. As we have pointed out before, the Senate version of the PATRIOT reauthorization bill contains important checks and balances that are not in the House bill. The conference negotiators can also begin to rein in the unchecked power of National Security Letters. (Please see the bottom of this email for a list of conferees.) ACTION: Urge your Members of Congress to support the Senate PATRIOT Act reforms and to put a new sunset on the National Security Letter provisions and to urge their colleagues who are conferees to do so as well. Capitol Hill switchboard number is: 202-224-3121. BACKGROUND ON NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS Both the "motion to instruct" and the meeting of the conference negotiators offer opportunities to respond to the troubling new revelations of the FBI's unrestrained powers to demand sensitive records. A national security letter (also called an "NSL") is literally a piece of paper signed by an FBI field supervisor ordering a bank, a credit agency, a telephone company or an ISP (i.e., a library that provides public access to the Internet) to turn over financial records, credit reports and Internet and telephone transactional records about anyone, even about people suspected of no wrongdoing. The FBI agent does not need to get approval from a judge, prosecutor or grand jury, and the recipient is permanently "gagged" from telling its customers or anyone else about the government's snooping. Citizens never know that their personal information has been disclosed to the government. Neither the Senate version nor the House version of the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill contains meaningful reforms to NSLs. In fact, while both bills give recipients of an NSL the right to go to court to challenge the gag order and the underlying request for documents, both bills also impose criminal penalties for failure to comply. In light of the new revelations about the wide-ranging and frequent use of NSLs, it is clear that the House and Senate should have put stronger limits on the use of these powers. There is probably no time to craft those standards now, however. Therefore, Congress should "sunset" the NSL provisions, so that they expire in 2 or 4 years unless meaningful checks and balances can be adopted in the meantime. Certainly, NSLs should not be expanded any further. The following Senators are the conferees who will meet to hammer out the details of the final bill: Arlen Specter (R-PA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Jon Kyl (R-TX), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Mike DeWine (R-OH), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Pat Leahy (D-VT), John Rockefeller (D-WV), Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA). The following Representatives are likely to be named on Wednesday for the House: James Sensenbrenner (R-5th, WI), Peter Hoekstra (R-2d, MI), Howard Coble (R-6th, NC), Lamar Smith (R-21st, TX), Elton Gallegly (R-24th, CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-6th, VA), Steve Chabot (R-1st, OH), John Conyers (D-14th, MI), Howard Berman (D-28th, CA), Rick Boucher (D-9th, VA), Jane Harman (D-36th, CA) and Jerry Nadler (D-8th, NY). ****** ALAWON (ISSN 1069-7799) is a free, irregular publication of the American Library Association Washington Office. All materials subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be reprinted or redistributed for noncommercial purposes with appropriate credits. To subscribe to ALAWON, send the message: subscribe ala-wo [your_firstname] [your_lastname] to listproc@ala.org or go to http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. To unsubscribe to ALAWON, send the message: unsubscribe ala-wo to listproc@ala.org. ALAWON archives at http://www.ala.org/washoff/alawon. 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