Plan to Let F.B.I. Track Mail in Terrorism Inquiries

Sat May 21 18:52:41 EDT 2005

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/politics/21terror.html?ei=5065&en=5515a53963929748&ex=1117339200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print>

The New York Times
May 21, 2005

 By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 20 - The F.B.I. would gain broad authority to track the
mail of people in terror investigations under a Bush administration
proposal, officials said Friday, but the Postal Service is already raising
privacy concerns about the plan.

The proposal, to be considered next week in a closed-door meeting of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, would allow the bureau to direct postal
inspectors to turn over the names, addresses and all other material
appearing on the outside of letters sent to or from people connected to
foreign intelligence investigations.

The plan would effectively eliminate the postal inspectors' discretion in
deciding when so-called mail covers are needed and give sole authority to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if it determines that the material is
"relevant to an authorized investigation to obtain foreign intelligence,"
according to a draft of the bill.

The proposal would not allow the bureau to open mail or review its content.
Such a move would require a search warrant, officials said.

The Intelligence Committee has not publicly released the proposal, but a
draft was obtained by The New York Times.

The provision is part of a broader package that also strengthens the
bureau's power to demand business records in intelligence investigations
without approval by a judge or grand jury.

The proposals reflect efforts by the administration and Senate Republicans
to bolster and, in some ways, broaden the power of the bureau to fight
terrorism, even as critics are seeking to scale back its authority under
the law known as the USA Patriot Act.

A debate over the government's terrorism powers is to begin in earnest at a
session of the Intelligence Committee on Thursday, in what is shaping up as
a heated battle over the balance between fighting terrorism and protecting
civil rights in the post-Sept. 11 era.

The F.B.I. has conducted mail covers for decades in criminal and national
security investigations. But the prospect of expanding its authority to
monitor mailings alarmed some privacy and civil rights advocates and caused
concerns among postal officials, as well. They said the proposal caught
them off guard.

"This is a major step," the chief privacy officer for the Postal Service,
Zoe Strickland, said. "From a privacy perspective, you want to make sure
that the right balance is struck between protecting people's mail and
aiding law enforcement, and this legislation could impact that balance
negatively."

The new proposal "removes discretion from the Postal Inspection Service as
to how the mail covers are implemented," Ms. Strickland said in an
interview. "I worry quite a bit about the balance being struck here, and
we're quite mystified as to how this got put in the legislation."

Officials on the Intelligence Committee said the legislation was intended
to make the F.B.I. the sole arbiter of when a mail cover should be
conducted, after complaints that undue interference from postal inspectors
had slowed operations.

"The F.B.I. would be able to control its own investigations of terrorists
and spies, and the postal service would have to comply with those
requests," said an aide to the Intelligence Committee who is involved in
the proposal but insisted on anonymity because the proposal remains
confidential.

"The postmaster general shouldn't be able to substitute his judgment for
that of the director of the F.B.I. on national security matters," the aide
said.

The proposal would generally prevent the post office from disclosing a mail
cover. It would also require the Justice Department to report to Congress
twice a year on the number of times the power had been used.

Civil rights advocates said they thought that the proposal went too far.

"Prison wardens may be able to monitor their prisoners' mail," said Lisa
Graves, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, "but
ordinary Americans shouldn't be treated as prisoners in their own country."

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a
public interest group here, said the proposal "certainly opens the door to
abuse in our view."

"The Postal Service would be losing its ability to act as a check on the
F.B.I.'s investigative powers," Ms. Hofmann said.

Postal officials refused to provide a tally of mail covers, saying the
information was confidential. They said the Postal Service had not formally
rejected any requests from the bureau in recent years.

A tally in 2000 said the Postal Service conducted 14,000 mail covers that
year for a variety of law enforcement agencies, a sharp increase over the
previous year.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In the mid-1970's the
Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a
program created in the 1950's in New York that used mail covers to trace
and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter
to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an
investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge, who
found that the national security grounds for such mail covers were
unconstitutionally vague.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com