30,000 Subpoenas A Year?

by tristero

It truly is obscene to label the so-called “Patriot Act”an act of patriots:

After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.

The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.

It was unclear what impact the government’s decision would have on the approximately 30,000 other such letters that are issued each year. Changes in the Patriot Act now allow the government discretion over whether to enforce or relax what had been a blanket secrecy requirement concerning the letters…

Ms. Beeson said yesterday that she believed the government’s decision to drop the appeal was politically timed.

“The issue over whether the government was using its Patriot Act powers to demand library records was one of the hot-button issues in this debate,” she said. “And our clients could have been extremely powerful spokespeople in opposing the reauthorization of the act, because they had actually received one of those national security letters.”

Now that the debate in Congress is over, she said, “There’s no longer any reason to keep our clients quiet.”

By the way, the reason they dropped their objections is that the prosecutors had made a little boo-boo, inadvertently revealing the name of the group, the Library Connection, in court filings, which led to the name being published in the NY Times.

UPDATE: The original title of this post was “30,000 Subpoenas A Year To Libraries?” Several commenters noted that the article simply says that 30,000 subpoenas a year, in the form of “national security letters” are sent out. It is, as I read it, vague as to whether those are all sent to libraries. However, once you folks pointed it out, I obviously misread it: 30,000 subpoenas to libraries would be incredible even by the incredible standards of the Bush administration. I apologize for the mistake.