Your Friendly Little National Security Letter
(Brought To You By Our Post Office and Those Guys Who Know You Participate In Life.)
Like good lawyers have argued for a long time about the parking liability restrictions hanging in public garages, as citizens of this country we don't become subject to contractual obligations simply by walking by someone else's legalese.
In the same way, it seems reasonable that we have more than a passing connection to a potential bad man (are there bad women?) in order to have our right of privacy circumvented in favor of law enforcement assuming that we are guilty through participatory association.
The days of high speed, pervasive and perhaps even perpetual connectivity, it is becoming imperative that we learn more about where giving in to some level of social interaction makes us automatically a subscriber to someone else's tracking tools.
I posed a question in my Phicons article recently about when was the last time your car mechanic shared with you the story of the electronic breadcrumbs of your car's new fancy "black box." California's industry-specific Constitutional rights to privacy make this little exception as a hedge against manufacturers' inconveniences.
Now we see that this little out is hardly unique. Perhaps our capitalistic security mongers have convinced themselves that if they generate enough postage they can keep the business of the U.S. Post Office healthy and wealthy and strong.
Enter the NSL: your National Security Letter.
NSLs are the printer-to-paper version of a black box for community trails. It is a letter sent by our national security establishment to some group of suspiciously interlinked people who might be able to identify others who might know something about something that might be bad.
On Sunday, November 6, 2005 (at 1:04 a.m. ET), MSN posted a story on how the "FBI mines records of ordinary Americans," a story written by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. In his piece he details how the Patriot Act is being used to probe the lives of regular people who are not even alleged to have terrorist connections.
Unless you can jump the great divide of freedom and say a person can be guilty because of his participatory associations.
To extract just one chilling quote: "That standard enables investigators to look for conspirators by sifting the records of nearly anyone who crosses a suspect's path."
To avoid finding myself on the receiving end of just such a letter—oh wait a minute, my "as of yet unidentified" publisher has sent strong nonverbal coded signals encrypted just for me or whomever may be listening that she/he would love me to receive such an invite—I will quote two parts of the Gellman article verbatim (assuming MSN got it right; and we do know technology makes no mistakes … well except for chemical assays or fingerprint comparisons of "empirical" evidence against those criminal types):
"The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined."
I added the underlining for dramatic effect.
Or how about this non-caloric WHOPPER:
"A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work."
Take heed, dear friends and critics of my Right To Participation Wiki-ings. Does a right to privacy really exist if it does not cover how much money I make or spend, with whom I live, how much I gamble, what I buy, pawn or borrow, where I go (no wait: that's covered by the auto black box exception), my investment strategies, my dirty little Google secrets and who telephones or emails me?
Let's try this again.
I think we need details to protect a fundamental Right to Participation in this digital age. And I for one would rather have the elements of such a right "Open Sourced" by you good people or even a few wackos than just wait around for them to be executively ordered by a "democratically" elected prince or princes of anti-terror tactics.
If you think I'm joking about all this, click to: http://g.msn.com/0MN2ET7/2?http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9939709&&CM=EmailThis&CE=1.
Or check out my incredibly simplistic alternative http://OurRightToParticipation.pbwiki.com.
Either way, I'm sorry to say, you should be aware that you are leaving a trail that any good little security agent might stumble across.
So what say we take a stabe at getting to where we want to be on this treasure hunt for freedom before the monitor-ites get there before we do.
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