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Kahle challenges FBI and FBI withdraws demand for IA user information
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has withdrawn a secret demand, issued as a national security letter (NSL), that the Internet Archive (IA) provide the agency with a user's personal information after Brewster Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the records request in court.
- FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional NSL Served on Internet Archive, ACLU. (Includes links to documents)
Since the Patriot Act was authorized in 2001, relaxing restrictions on the FBI's use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase. Reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General reveal that the FBI has issued nearly 200,000 NSL between 2003 and 2006. Multiple investigations have found serious FBI abuses of regulations and numerous potential violations of the law.
- Internet Archive Challenges F.B.I.’s Secret Records Demand, by Grant Gross, IDG News Service, New York Times, May 7, 2008 (or Internet Archive challenges FBI's secret records demand, by Grant Gross, in InfoWorld).
In each of the three court challenges to the NSL program, the FBI has withdrawn the information demands, ACLU's Goodman said. "I think that calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place and, frankly, whether the FBI needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power," she said.Continue reading
Fister on Privacy, Facebook, Google, Libraries
This is a very useful and thoughtful piece that starts with musings on Facebook and privacy issues and addresses much larger issues that affect libraries and library users and academic publishing. This is a must read.
- Face Value, By Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (Feb. 18, 2008).
Sample:
Libraries have always taken privacy seriously - not because it's valuable in itself, but because it's a necessary condition for the freedom to read whatever you want without risk of penalty. When the PATRIOT Act was passed, librarians checked to make sure their databases erased the connection between a book and its borrower as soon as the book was returned. That erasure, however, makes it harder to offer the kind of personalization, such as recommendations based on previous book choices, that the public increasingly expects from online systems. After all, it's what they get from Amazon.
...[W]e've barely begun to examine the unintended consequences of the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through privately-owned digital domains of the public sphere.
Joe Esposito pointed to this article in a posting to the liblicense-l mailing list and he says:
As I was reading this, I reflected on an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine, a former Congressional staffer, about the growing political need for Google to be declared a regulated public utiility, like the AT&T of yesteryear. Too much power in the hands of too few: it's morally wrong, and socially dangerous.
I would just add to this that, when we rely on the government to be the only official repository of all government information, we are putting too much power in the hands of too few. We are allowing the government to be the only entity that controls access to that information and the privacy or lack of privacy of all readers of that information. The solution to that is to build collections of digital government information is libraries. We have barely begun to understand the Faustian bargain we strike when we share content through a single government-controlled digital repository.
Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her blog is barbara fister's place.
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