In all of the harrumphing over the war in Iraq, the omnibus and ill-named War on Terror keeps taking a back seat. The big media spotlight is on the civil unrest and militant posturing in the Persian Gulf. All of that is certainly important, but it should not cause us to abjectly bow to a perversion of our civil rights at home merely because we’re so focused elsewhere that we fail to fight the danger directly in front of us.
The Bush Administration has taken aim not at terrorists, but at civil liberties and the foundational freedoms that define this nation. And it has dragooned the business community as its accomplice in the erosion of those liberties. It’s a dangerous path we’re on. We are not winning any victories in nations overseas, and under the cloak of righteousness we are destroying our own fragile underpinnings.
Take, for example, the issue of spying on U.S. citizens. The Founding Fathers knew all about the abuses not only likely but inevitable when government took command of its subjects’ liberty. It is why they put checks in place to hinder the government from simply roughing up residents whenever it felt like it. The police aren’t allowed to just go into home after home, snooping through drawers and desks, in the off-chance they’ll find someone doing something wrong. The cops can’t just show up at a business office and demand to see all personnel records, hoping they might come across someone with an outstanding warrant.
But the FBI has been doing so much more. It has been bullying telephone and Internet service companies into handing over hundreds of thousands of customer records, not because any of those customers are actually suspected of terrorism, but just so the government could monitor whether they should be.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge struck down portions of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the thoughtless, fear-induced legislation that emboldened the FBI to become this nation’s SS. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been serving National Security Letters on telecom companies. NSLs are insidious, because under the Patriot Act they are secret, the recipient companies cannot disclose to anyone that they’ve even been served one, they require no judicial approval (as do most other warrants) and yet they also leave companies open to liability for complying, because customers can sue them for releasing private data.
A March government report showed that the FBI issued approximately 8,500 national security letter (NSL) requests in 2000, the year before the passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. The number of requests rose to 39,000 by 2003 and to 56,000 in 2004 before falling to 47,000 in 2005. The overwhelming majority of the requests sought telephone billing records information, telephone or e-mail subscriber information or electronic communication transactional records. Earlier this year, the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered 700 cases in which FBI agents obtained telephone records letters asserting that grand jury subpoenas had been requested for the data when in fact such subpoenas never had been sought.
The Hartford-based Center for First Amendment Rights is planning an October 12 workshop at the UConn Business School on how companies should deal with Patriot Act issues. It’s a timely symposium, especially given the ruling by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero that such NSL letters must be subject to judicial review. Companies facing government’s insistence that they turn over customer records need recourse to fight those requests.
Of course, some probably wonder: why should they fight? Why not comply when doing so might aid in the safety of the nation? The answer was made clear by the judge in his ruling:
The Constitution, he wrote, was designed “so that the dangers of any given moment would never suffice as justification for discarding fundamental individual liberties.” No democracy but one has ever stood the test of time. To keep that true, we have to keep fighting for it at home, not just abroad.
