Washington Post: Library Case Exemplar of "FBI's Secret Scrutiny"

-- Library Journal, 11/10/2005

A lengthy Washington Post analysis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's effort to use National Security Letters to examine the records of ordinary Americans focused, in its first example, on the "John Doe" case of the Connecticut library challenging the gag order imposed by the USA PATRIOT Act. Not only did the Post identify the plaintiff as The Library Connection, a Connecticut consortium, it also pieced together documents to show that the consortium's George Christian stated that he configures the system for privacy, but the software vendors used by the consortium say their databases can show agents the virtual paper trail of sites visited and books borrowed by system users.

The Post reported, "The FBI now issues more than 30,000 National Security Letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms," and those NSLs receive no review either before or after the fact. Nor are they subject to a sunset provision when the Patriot Act is renewed, though both the House and Senate have voted to make noncompliance with a national security letter a criminal offense. Michael Woods, former chief of the FBI's national security law unit, warned in 2001 that NSLs "must be used judiciously," but told the Post recently that the FBI had disregarded his advice.