Kevin Drum links to today’s excellent Washington Post article on National Security Letters. There are a lot of disturbing things in the article, above all the number of letters issued: more than 30,000 a year. I find it hard to believe that all those letters are legitimately related to national security. The permanency of the gag order and the lack of a standard procedure for review are also troubling.
However, there is one aspect which I am more inclined to defend:
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. … Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.
I’m not sure what “appropriate private sector entities” might be. But in the wake of 9/11, there was a great deal of criticism claiming a lack of information sharing among law enforcement agencies. Assuming the information is legitimately collected in the first place, shared databases and multi-agency access sound to me like things we should be encouraging.
I understand that disseminating information creates privacy issues, just as collecting it does. The difference lies in the nature of bureacracies. Agencies naturally attempt to increase their own power. There is little–or at least lesser–risk of limitations on collection causing an agency to become too timid about gathering information. Conversely, bureacracies have inherent problems with information sharing. Erecting additional barriers within the law-enforcement community–even with good cause–is likely to exacerbate that natural tendency.
Since we need barriers, it makes sense to build them outside law enforcement, where they will counterbalance bureaucratic instincts, rather than inside, where they could make an existing problem worse.
