More Evidence Of The FBI's Orwellian Attempts To Turn America Into A Police State
The "Big Brother" spy system of George Orwell's anti-Utopian nightmare "1984" has become a horrifying reality in modern day AmeriKa, where the U.S Intel community is quite literally getting away with murder each and every day.
FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses
By Ryan Singel
May 07, 2008 1:22:28 PM
The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.
On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a controversial National Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive's lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint (.pdf) to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.
The Patriot Act greatly expanded the reach of NSLs, which are subpoenas for documents such as billing records and telephone records that the FBI can issue in terrorism investigations without a judge's approval. Nearly all NSLs come with gag orders forbidding the recipient from ever speaking of the subpoena, except to a lawyer.
Brewster Kahle called the gag order "horrendous," saying he couldn't talk about the case with his board members, wife or staff, but said that his stand was part of a time-honored tradition of librarians protecting the rights of their patrons.
See the rest of this article here:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/internet-archiv.html
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