The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond.

The WashPost has a very good feature on National Security Letters here.

Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

The situation with NSLs has always gotten me riled up. I think giving the investigative agencies a license to request information without any type of review is a disaster for civil liberties happening silently.

I do understand the value of having as much information on hand as possible to do link analysis. It's a subject I might even qualify as an expert on. Let's just say you are pulling telephone call records for a suspect, and the records of everyone he was in contact with. You certainly do have a good pool there to do link analysis. Going out another level would be pointless, but from what you find at the first level, you may decide to expand certain specific people who show connections or become of interest. It's a very reasonable way to conduct a non-intrusive investigation. That's exactly the type of thing going on, I'm sure of it, and it has a hell of a lot more to it than phone records.

However non-intrusive that may appear at first glance, some review is still necessary. There is a big difference between a directed and scoped search, and trying to find needles in a haystack by x-raying the haystack. We do have this thing called the 4th amendment. I would like to think that our right to privacy extends to data of ours that we entrust to others, like our banks, schools, libraries, service providers, etc.. I fear that rather than privacy, we only simply have the right to be left alone. Which when put that way, doesn't say anything against ransacking your digital records, as long as you don't know about it.

Is the citizens' duty in the Global War on Terrorism to submit to being a node in a big graph? What kind of node are you? What kind of nodes are your friends? All mine are hackers, and we are nervous. Nodes can easily look nefarious when that's what you are looking to find.

I strongly suggest reading this entire article.