Last month, the Fourth U.S. District Court in Richmond, VA ruled that law enforcement authorities do not need a subpoena to monitor a suspect’s communications records from a tower to a cellular phone. The decision has raised the collective eyebrows of industry and civil rights groups. They are already concerned that pending legislation could further extend the categories of internet records that the Feds can collect without court approval through administrative orders known as National Security Letters, computerworld.com reported. Nearly 40 groups including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, American Civil Liberties Union American Library Association, Brennan Center for Justice, and the Free Press Action Fund, signed the letter sent Monday to senators on Capitol Hill.
The letter voiced concern that the proposed new law will expand the types of records, known as Electronic Communication Transactional Records (ECTRs) which, the news site said, the FBI can obtain using the NSLs. That would include a variety of online information, such as IP addresses, routing and transmission information, session data, a person’s browsing history, email metadata, location information, and the exact date and time a person signs in or out of a particular online account.
“The new categories of information that could be collected using an NSL and thus without any oversight from a judge would paint an incredibly intimate picture of an individual’s life,” the letter said.
But not only did the three-page letter mention concern that the information would be collected, it also signaled the government’s ability to commit abuse.
“The civil liberties and human rights concerns associated with such an expansion are compounded by the government’s history of abusing NSL authorities. In the past ten years, the FBI has issued over 300,000 NSLs, a vast majority of which included gag orders that prevented companies from disclosing that they received a request for information. An audit by the Office of the Inspector General (IG) at the Department of Justice in 2007, found that the FBI illegally used NSLs to collect information that was not permitted by the NSL statutes. In addition, the IG found that data collected pursuant to NSLs was stored indefinitely, used to gain access to private information in cases that were not relevant to an FBI investigation, and that NSLs were used to conduct bulk collection of tens of thousands of records at a time.”
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