From this morning's Washington Post:
Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telecom company, told congressional investigators that it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.
The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.
In an Oct. 12 letter replying to Democratic lawmakers, Verizon offered a rare glimpse into the way telecommunications companies cooperate with government requests for information on U.S. citizens.
Verizon also disclosed that the FBI, using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. [read the article]
Three questions:
- Without court orders?
- Hundreds of times?
- All the people called by all the people called by the suspect, whom they can't even get a warrant on? (Do the math. It won't take many disclosures like that before we're all in the files.)
A Verizon executive gets to decide whether your constitutional rights are going to be violated, because somebody from the FBI says it's an emergency. Agents get to decide when to bypass the courts, by simply claiming they have an emergency. Even in the best of worlds, some agents will start deciding they have an emergency any time they're not sure they have grounds for a warrant.
It's time that we stopped merely trying to reign in the Bush administration. We need to repair our democracy before it evolves into a police state.
It should be a criminal act to give out private information without a warrant, even to the government—especially to the government. Verizon should have been required to ask for the warrant, under law—and the law should forbid any exceptions, including fine print in customer contracts. And there should be an agency, independent of the executive branch, charged with prosecuting companies that violate such laws.
Checks and balances aren't a one-time provision, automatically provided by the constitution.
They have to be maintained, and updated, as circumstances change.
