[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[House]
[Page 25297]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            CITIZEN PRIVACY

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the Sunday Washington Post had an 
extraordinary story as a result of investigative journalism. The FBI 
has issued 30,000 national security letters. Now, we will have to back 
up for a moment to understand what that means. Four years ago, this 
Congress was stampeded under the anthrax attack and 9/11 into passing a 
bill it had not read, the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which contained many 
unconstitutional and dubious provisions, many bad ideas from past 
attorneys general, rejected by previous Congresses, passed in a 
hysterical time for the Congress.
  Now it is about to be reauthorized, and, in fact, strengthened in 
many ways. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of that 
legislation. These national security letters used to be fairly rare. 
They used to issue about 300 a year. They are now issuing 30,000 a 
year, a 100-fold increase. This is an extraordinary intrusion into the 
personal lives of many Americans who are not accused of or even 
suspected of crimes.
  As the Post reports, they are issued by FBI field supervisors, local 
law enforcement FBI agents, not from the national office, no judicial 
review, no review by the Justice Department, no review by the United 
States Congress, totally at the discretion of local field supervisors. 
In fact, the Bush Administration has defeated legislation and a lawsuit 
to require a public accounting, and they have offered no example, not 
one, 30,000 a year, and they do not have one example of a national 
security letter impeding a terrorist attack or actually apprehending a 
terrorist.
  Well, they did apprehend a guy in Portland, Oregon and they did use 
national security letters. Unfortunately, he was innocent. They were 
wrong.
  As far as we know, it has been used once to apprehend someone and now 
the government is at risk of paying substantial damages for that false 
arrest. We do not know of any successful uses. The Bush Administration 
is defending this. Now they are going to deposit all the information 
acquired in these massive sweeps of all citizens' credit card records, 
phone calls, e-mails, everything that relates to who they talk to, who 
they see, where they go, what they buy, and they are going to put it 
into government data banks.
  But don't worry. Don't worry. They are going to share those private 
records only with, they say, other Federal agencies, State, local, 
tribal governments, and appropriate private sector entities. Americans 
who have had their most intimate lives swept up because of a letter 
written by a local field supervisor, by the FBI, are now going to have 
all of that data placed into a data bank, which will be restricted to 
Federal, State, local, tribal governments and appropriate private 
sector entities. Maybe your next-door neighbor, too, if they are really 
nosey.
  This is an extraordinary, unwarranted intrusion into the lives of 
Americans. They cannot even properly analyze and use the data they 
have. They had the threads of the terrorist attack between the CIA, the 
FBI and others, they knew a number of these people were in the country 
illegally, but they could not be bothered to go out and apprehend them 
or monitor them.
  Now they are just gathering up data wholesale on the American people. 
They are going to share it with other Federal agencies, put it in a 
private data bank, share it with other forms of government, share it 
with Native American tribes, for some reason, and appropriate private 
sector entities. Who are the appropriate private sector entities? Those 
who could make money off it? I don't know. This is an unbelievable 
intrusion into personal lives.
  If you get one of these letters, and you are in a position to give 
away someone else's data, if you administer a database for your company 
or for a credit card company or for a library or a bookstore and you 
get one of these letters, the new PATRIOT Act is going to say if you 
tell anybody that you got one of these letters, and you provided 
indiscriminately massive amounts of data on innocent Americans, you 
would be a felon if you had told anybody that you had gotten such a 
letter and you had violated their privacy in that way.
  Then, of course, again, the data will be then taken, put into a 
database, and shared widely with other governments and appropriate 
private sector entities. It is unbelievable what this administration is 
doing to shred our privacy and constitutional rights.

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