SEARCH AND DESTROY

YOUR GOVERNMENT HAS A MESSAGE for you.  The Fourth Amendment rights you have to be secure in your home and person, to be subject to search only but upon probable cause no longer apply. The government doesn’t even have to tell you when you have been searched. [story]

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.

DON’T BOTHER telling it to a judge. You have no appeal. And some bureaucrat doesn’t’ need to go to a judge to get the goods on you.  The National Security Letter is the greatest threat to your personal security. And it comes not from some foreign power, but from the unbridled power of your government.

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.

BAD GETS WORSE Even the innocent can now expect their personal information to shoot out into all branches of government. 

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.

GET USED TO IT. We are all screwed.  If you get a National Security Letter, you are forever gagged from saying anything about it.  If James Sensenbrenner has his way and if you do reveal you received an NSL, you can go to jail.

MORE ON National Security Letters here. A lighter touch here.