[NetBehaviour] Archive.org Defeats FBI's Demand For User Information.

[marc garrett]

Archive.org Defeats FBI's Demand For User Information.

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.

"This is an unqualified success that will help other recipients 
understand that you can push back on these," Kahle said in a conference 
call with reporters Wednesday morning.

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 hundreds 
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 it has issued.

The Internet Archive's case is only the third known court challenge to 
an NSL, all of which ended with the FBI rescinding the NSL, according to 
the ACLU's Melissa Goodman.

"That makes you wonder about the the hundreds of thousands of NSLs that 
haven't been challenged," Goodman said, suggesting that the FBI had 
collected sensitive information on innocent Americans.

more info...
http://radiok.cce.umn.edu/multimedia/
http://www.archive.org/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/internet-archiv.html