One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.
This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!
(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)
Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.
What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.
The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.
(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)
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