FBI access to e-mails, web records sparks privacy fears

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, seen in this June 28, 2010 photo, claims that the US administration's proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act "raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns."

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INVASION of privacy in the Internet age. Expanding the reach of law enforcement to snoop on e-mail traffic or on web surfing. Those are among criticisms being aimed at the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation as it tries to update a major surveillance law.

With its proposed amendment, is the Obama administration merely clarifying a statute or going too far? Only time and a suddenly on-guard Congress will tell.

Federal law requires communications providers to produce records in counterintelligence investigations to the FBI, which does not need a judge's approval and court order to get them.

They can be obtained merely with the signature of a special agent in charge of any FBI field office, and there is no need even for a suspicion of wrongdoing; merely the assertion that the records would be relevant in a counterintelligence or counterterror investigation.

The person whose records the government wants does not even need to be a suspect. The bureau's use of these so-called "national security letters" to gather information has a checkered history.

The bureau engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority to issue the letters, illegally collecting data from Americans and foreigners, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in 2007. The bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests from 2003 to 2006.

Weathering that controversy, the FBI has continued its reliance on the letters to gather information from telephone companies, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses with personal records about their customers or subscribers and from Internet service providers.

That last source is the focus of the Justice Department's chief arguments in support of modifying the law. The law already requires Internet service providers to produce the records, according to Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's national security division.

In the face of that argument, an important Senate Democrat, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, wants a time out. The administration's proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act "raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns," Leahy said on Thursday.

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