Chicago Sun-Times Editorial - Ruling should save FBI from its own worst impulses

Chicago Sun-Times Editorial - Ruling should save FBI from its own worst impulses
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times Editorial - Ruling should save FBI from its own worst impulses
September 10, 2007


Score one for the First Amendment: A federal judge in New York has struck down as unconstitutional the FBI's dreaded "national security letters." One of the shadiest secret surveillance measures the Bush administration has employed in the name of counterterrorism, the letters were enacted under the USA Patriot Act. They not only allowed the FBI to force telephone and Internet providers and other communications companies to turn over customers' records without judicial oversight. They also barred the recipients of such letters from telling anyone, including the customers, they had received a letter.

This program, wrote U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, amounted to "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values." The warrantless access was in violation of the principal of separation of powers. The inability of the courts to review challenges to the disclosure ban in most cases further added to the circular, Orwellian nature of this domestic spying.

Judging by the game of volleyball Congress and the judicial system have played with this issue, Marrero's is not likely to be the final opinion. An earlier version of the same law, enjoined by him in 2004 and another federal judge a year later, was merely tweaked by Congress last year in reauthorizing the Patriot Act. The government will likely appeal last week's decision.

But at least for the moment, the FBI won't be going through tens of thousand of people's phone and Internet records every year, without warrants or even having to say how the information pertains to terrorism. Even when the bureau was authorized to enforce these letters, it frequently violated the law in doing so, according to a report released earlier this year by the Justice Department's inspector general. Marrero's ruling should save it from its own worst impulses.