gavel
Gavel photo copied from fbi.gov [Gag on that!]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that yesterday, the Second Circuit Court struck down the gag orders associated with National Security Letters:

The court found the National Security Letter (NSL) statute’s gag provision unconstitutional in Doe v. Mukasey. The NSL law allows the government to seek your electronic communications transactional records from your ISP without obtaining a court order. The gag provisions required the recipient of a NSL to stay quiet as long as the government desired, with only a fig leaf of judicial review.

The NSL statute can be read here.

The opinion can be read here.

The ACLU discussed this case in a press release in August, when the case was argued:

In oral arguments today, the American Civil Liberties Union urged a federal appeals court to uphold a decision striking down the national security letter (NSL) provision of the Patriot Act. This provision gives the FBI the authority to issue letters demanding private information about people within the United States, and to place the recipients of the letters under indefinite gag orders. Recent reports issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have revealed the FBI’s widespread, systemic abuse of its NSL power.

"The FBI shouldn’t have the unreviewable power to impose gag orders on the recipients of national security letters," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project who argued today in court. "As the district court ruled, the FBI’s power to silence the recipients of these letters has to be subject to judicial oversight. Without that check, the FBI can use its power to hide abuses and silence its critics – and that’s exactly what it’s been doing."

In case after case, the Bush Administration’s massive abuses of civil liberties have been shown to be unconstitutional and illegal. Why does Congress keep trying to make these acts legal after the fact?