So one would imagine that, after Congress has found the original draft of Section 215 to be overly broad, Bush administration officials would be eager to work with civil libertarians to assuage their concerns that this power, granted to law enforcement officials for almost five unsupervised years, might have been abused.
We should know better by now:
With the help of the ACLU, Library Connection in Connecticut successfully fought against the FBI's use of a "National Security Letter" to demand patron records without a court order. The government had gagged Library Connection from identifying itself as an NSL recipient even after its identity was revealed by the New York Times. When the ACLU sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court to lift the gag last October, the government required all the court documents to be filed under seal. Those documents, available for the first time today, included copies of New York Times articles and phrases such as "the genie is out of the bottle" and "the cat is out of the bag."
