Another Judge Rules National Security Letters (NSLs) Unconstitutional
A federal district court judge on March 15 ruled that National Security Letters (NSLs) are unconstitutional not only under the First Amendment but also under the “separation of powers” principle. As Alex Johnson, a staff writer for NBC News, put it, those NSLs are “the supersecret mechanism[s] by which the FBI can get your private information without a warrant in the name of counterterrorism.”
The suit was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group that supports personal privacy over the Internet, on behalf of an Internet provider that received an NSL from the FBI to provide customer information. The suit claimed the FBI’s letter was unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s guaranteed right to free speech as well as under the principle of separation of powers in that information was demanded without a court order or a probable cause search warrant...
Rev. Armen Thomassian | 11/17/2015
