There's a move afoot on Capitol Hill to rein in some of the vast powers
conferred upon government investigators by the PATRIOT Act, the infamous,
hastily crafted law written in response to the September 11th attacks. New legislation has
been introduced in both Houses of Congress intended to curb the FBI's ability to
collect private data on virtually anybody using a tool called a national
security letter (NSL). The bills come in the wake of yet another damaging FBI
inspector general report on the bureau's abuse of its expanded
authorities.

"The privacy of American citizens is a core value in our society," said
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former federal prosecutor and member of the
Senate Judiciary Committee at an April 23 hearing on the FBI's use of NSLs. "I
think this is our next really big civil liberties issue."

And addressing that issue may start with a bill, sponsored by Sen. Russ
Feingold (D-Wisc.), which would both drastically limit the circumstances under
which these secretive orders are issued and strictly regulate how the
information obtained is handled by the FBI.

NSLs function, in some superficial ways, as traditional subpoenas. Like
subpoenas, they require recipients to turn over information that might be
relevant to criminal investigators. Unlike subpoenas, however, NSLs aren't
subject to judicial oversight, making them ripe for abuse.

An NSL authorizes the acquisition of what's known as metadata;
information--like phone records, and financial statements--that reveal a
suspect's behavioral modes only. An NSL can't, for instance, serve as a warrant
for a wiretap, but it can be used to obtain reams of data about an individual's
calling patterns. It is often used to collect a person's business (or
"transactional") information as well--with an NSL, the FBI can ask for a
person's insurance information, but not his medical records.

NSLs aren't subject to the approval of any court or judge, they can be
issued under extremely broad circumstances, and, by way of a sweeping gag order,
they forbid the recipient from discussing the information request under almost
any circumstances. And their use has exploded since the passage of the PATRIOT
Act, which removed almost all legal restrictions on the FBI's authority to issue
them.

Dubbed the National Security Letter Reform Act of 2007, Feingold's bill
would check NSL authority in a number of ways. Among other things, it would
limit the type of information the FBI can demand in an NSL to a defined category
of less-sensitive data (such as names, addresses, account numbers, IP addresses,
and other identifying materials), while requiring agents to seek more personal
information (phone and financial records, for instance) through some sort of
judicial process. It would limit the now-indefinite term of the gag order to no
more than six months. And it would restrict the FBI's ability to share the
obtained information--now stored on three FBI databases and accessible by
thousands of people--with other agencies.

A similar bill introduced in the House by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
would allow victims of illegally applied NSLs to sue for damages in civil
court.

Both bills, in short, seek to prevent the FBI from repeating an incident
that took place in North Carolina in July 2005.

At the time, FBI agents in Raleigh were seeking the educational records
of an Egyptian man named Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, once a student at
North Carolina State University (and innocent of any wrongdoing, it turns out),
in conjunction with their investigation of the London subway bombings earlier
that month. As part of an apparent attpemt to avoid judicial oversight, and
despite the fact that NSLs do not apply to school records, the FBI handed
university officials an NSL. In doing so, the bureau broke the law.

Realizing, correctly, that NSLs did not apply to el-Nashar's private
files, lawyers for the university refused to turn over his records to the FBI,
telling the agents to come back with a grand jury subpoena instead.

In fact, according to a report released earlier this month by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FBI had actually obtained the documents it
was seeking using a subpoena days before the university rebuffed its NSL
request. But then, perhaps to keep its investigation of el-Nashar as covert as
possible, FBI agents returned the documents to the school and re-requested them
with the unlawful NSL. When the university refused to comply with the letter,
FBI director Robert Mueller used the occasion to argue that his agency's NSL
authority needed to be strengthened.

Not all letter recipients have been as cautious as North Carolina State.
A 2007 FBI audit, which sampled 10 percent of all NSLs issued between 2003 and
2005, discovered hundreds of instances in which the FBI collected information it
didn't have the authority to obtain. In only four cases was that improperly
obtained information purged from the FBI's databases.

A widely-reported inspector general review in 2007 documented hundreds of
other examples of NSL abuse, and a follow-up report released this March
concluded that the FBI had failed to implement safeguards meant to mitigate
those abuses.

Aside from the Judiciary committee's ranking member, Sen. Arlen Specter
(R-Penn), only two Republicans--Sen. John Kyl (R-Az) and Sen. Jeff Sessions
(R-Ala)--attended last Wednesday's hearing. As a harbinger of the legislative
skirmish ahead, both men voiced strong reservations about the bill. Sessions in
particular said he disagreed with a previous tightening of the national security
letter provision in the Patriot Reauthorization Act of 2005, and objected to
further restrictions on the FBI's use of NSLs. The restrictions in the proposed
legislation, Sessions said, were "all to make sure than the spies and terrorists
have their full rights--in fact, have more rights than drug
dealers."

A distinctly different view was voiced by Specter, who complained that,
when it comes to the FBI's use of NSLs, Congress currently does not have "the
semblance of effective oversight."