The necessity of oversight...

I've noted in the past that even if you agree with the premise that the Patriot Act's authorization of so-called "National Security Letters" for secretive investigation of alleged terrorists is reasonable, such sweeping powers demand strong oversight and serious penalties for misuse. Since the recipients of a National Security Letter are forbidden to disclose it's existance, and the targets are generally not notified of the investigation, there is essentially no opportunity to contest the matter and little opportunity for abuses to come to light.

I figured it would be interesting to examine a similar area of law -- specifically, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. That law allows "copyright holders" (who can afford the lawyers necessary) to send letters to hosting providers who are hosting allegedly copyrighted content, requiring that the content be removed immediately. There's no court order necessary; just the letter. In theory, if the hosting provider determines that the content is actually not copyrighted, it doesn't have to take it down; in practice, they generally take the content down immediately and maybe put it back up eventually if the customer can prove that the complaint was inaccurate.

There are lots of DMCA letters sent to people illegally distributing copyrighted content, but there are lots sent to people who happen to be hosting content with a filename that just happens to resemble a common filename for copyrighted content, too. The industry is not very discriminating in who they send the letters to. The Chilling Effects project collected a number of such letters, and the University of Southern California has examined the collection (full version) and found that nearly a third of the letters demanded removed of the content despite a clear legal defense.

We know that the FBI has issued over 30,000 National Security Letters to date. If about the same rate applies, we can expect over 10,000 National Security Letters to have been issued for perfectly legal behavior. But we will likely never know about it, because no one is allowed to talk about it, and there is absolutely no oversight.

Posted on 2005-12-04 15:55:34.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

Check the groups below and enter your email address to receive updates by email:

The trackback URL for this entry is: http://triggerfinger.org/weblog/servlet/trackback/6897

No trackbacks have been posted so far.

No comments have been posted so far.