From American Library Association Washington Office Newsline: “Sunday’s article revealed that, since the PATRIOT Act changes, the FBI has been issuing “more than 30,000 national security letters a year – a hundredfold increase over historic norms.” The article also reported that the FBI no longer destroys data collected through such sweeps, even if it is irrelevant to the investigation at hand. Instead, the article states, the FBI has been ordered to keep the data, even when it is clear it is on innocent Americans, and “to develop ‘data mining’ technology “to probe for hidden links among the people in its growing cache of electronic files…In light of the new revelations about the wide-ranging and frequent use of NSLs, it is clear that the House and Senate should have put stronger limits on the use of these powers. There is probably no time to craft those standards now, however. Therefore, Congress should “sunset” the NSL provisions, so that they expire in 2 or 4 years unless meaningful checks and balances can be adopted in the meantime. Certainly, NSLs should not be expanded any further.”
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