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FBI Targets Internet Archive With Secret 'National Security Letter', Loses - Via Threat Level:
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 on the Internet Archive, asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address.
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 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.
The EFF, joined by the ACLU, challenged the constitutionality of NSLs, saying the gag order violates the First Amendment and that the specific NSL used was illegal since the Internet Archive is a library, not a communications provider.
Though FBI guidelines on using NSLs warned of overusing them, two Congressionally ordered audits revealed that the FBI had issued hundreds of illegal requests for student health records, telephone records and credit reports. The reports also found that the FBI had issued tens of thousands of NSLs since 2001, but failed to track their use. In a letter to Congress last week, the FBI admitted it can only estimate how many NSLs they have issued.
Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive's founder, will be talking with the media in a phone conference late morning PDT. Online court records do not include a ruling from the judge, but the groups say they successfully quashed the NSL and negotiated with the FBI to make the case public.
The ACLU has successfully squashed other NSLs, including one request to a library system asking for web surfing histories of patrons and another to a small New York hosting provider asking for data about a website it hosted. The Internet Archive case is only the second time the courts allowed the recipient of a Patriot Act National Security Letter to reveal his or her identity.
Court documents (.pdf):
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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)
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