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Victor Marrero, a judge of the Federal District Court in Manhattan has said that Congress exceded it authority when it included provisions for allowing the FBI to use national security letters to demand information from corporations about their customers. The government has time to appeal before the provision goes out of effect.

From the New York Times

Judge Marrero said he feared that the law could be the first step in a series of intrusions into the judiciary’s role that would be “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

According to a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general in March, the F.B.I. issued about 143,000 requests through national security letters from 2003 to 2005. The report found that the bureau had often used the letters improperly and sometimes illegally. (more)

From the BBC

The Patriot Act allows for the use of national security letters, or administrative subpoenas, in cases relating to spying or terrorism.

Under such a subpoena, personal records of clients and customers must be handed over to the FBI from such sources as banks, telephone firms and internet service providers.

Judge Marrero ruled in favour of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had complained against the use of such letters.

He said his ruling did not mean the FBI must get court approval before ordering records, but that it must be able to justify why the request should be kept secret. (more)

From the Wired

The ACLU sued on behalf of an anonymous internet service provider, which was served an NSL about one of the websites it hosted. The ISP contested the order, which the FBI subsequently dropped, but the ISP remains unable to even acknowledge that it got a request, and the company’s president said he’s been forced to lie to his friends and girlfriend about it.

Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York ruled that the gag order and the strict rules about how to contest them amounted to prior restraint on speech and allowed the FBI to pick and choose which persons would be gagged, based on whether the feds believed the target might speak critically of the government. Judge Marrero found, in a 106 page opinion, that the gag order provisions couldn’t be struck down without affecting the rest of the statute so he found that the entire NSL provision was unconstitutional. He also stuck down a provision that prescribed the standards courts should use in judging the FBI’s arguments for keeping gag orders. Marrero wrote that Congress had overstepped its bounds in setting out those standards.(more) (PDF of Ruling)

… Aside from that, though, the software has a lot of shortcomings. I wonder if they were designed to be intentional?

As I’ve indicated in previous posts, defense attorneys for years have been trying to discover the software source code used by manufacturers of various breathalyzer models. (See “Secret Breathalyzer Software Still Secret”) The accuracy of these machines, which essentially determine a suspect’s guilt or innocence, depends upon the accuracy of the software driving them; as the computer techs say, “Garbage in, garbage out”. But the manufacturers have refused to produce the information, relying upon a claim of “trade secrets” — that is, that the code of each model is a unique creation of the manufacturer. And prosecutors, apparently more concerned with profits than with justice, have joined them in resisting disclosure.

Recently, however, judges in Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey and a growing number of other states have begun ordering the manufacturers to reveal the inner workings of their machines to the defense. (See “Judge: Divulge Breathalyzer Code…or Else”.) Not surprisingly, the manufacturers have refused to comply. Until a few days ago….

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