Indeed it does. Businesses that receive national security letters are told to keep their existence secret. The businesses have no obvious mechanism to seek review of the command to violate their customers’ privacy, and they often don’t think it’s fair to turn over private information about customers without telling the customers about the intrusion.
Concerned about the circumvention of due process guarantees -- and about hefty compliance costs -- a half-dozen prominent business groups have joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to push Congress to narrow the law's scope. What's surprising in today's with-me-or-against-me Washington is that the coalition includes such Bush allies as NAM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Realtors.
The Justice Department claims it doesn’t overreach or engage in fishing expeditions. That claim is difficult to reconcile with the number of national security letters the administration has issued pursuant to the Patriot Act.
Since 2001 the feds have served as many as 30,000 letters a year, according to Administration sources and civil libertarians.
Maybe they aren’t fishing, but what’s wrong with requiring the government to obtain a warrant from a neutral magistrate before prying into private information? That requirement would help businesses that are now caught in the middle.
They say that compliance with the demands puts confidential financial data, trade secrets, and other proprietary information at risk. Another concern: the fear that multinationals could land in legal trouble abroad -- particularly in Europe -- for violating stringent privacy laws there if they comply with U.S. government demands for financial records.
Working with civil rights organizations, a plan has been proposed.
The business alliance spelled out its reform agenda in an Oct. 4 letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). The groups argue that the Patriot Act's Sections 215 and 505 "allow the federal government to require voluminous and often sensitive records...without [public] judicial oversight or other meaningful checks on the government's power." …
They argue in their Oct. 4 letter that the law "does not impose any limit on the breadth of records" demanded by federal agents, and they are seeking "a meaningful right to challenge the order when the order is unreasonable, oppressive, or seeks privileged [business] information." The coalition has urged Congress to give companies the right to seek court permission to lift the act's lifetime gag orders, an idea that may be taking hold.
The “usually business-friendly Bush Administration” doesn’t care, but elected senators and representatives have to care if they want to keep hauling in campaign contributions. And so negotiations over proposed reforms may leave the administration with a law that, while still unreasonably expansive of the federal power to snoop, is at least a bit better.
Gonzales is likely to be disappointed by many of the other provisions negotiators are now hammering out. Both the Senate and House versions of the measure would allow a judge to modify an FBI order that was deemed unreasonably burdensome on a business. And on Nov. 9, the House directed its team to accept Senate-passed provisions setting a four-year sunset clause on many of the Patriot Act's key provisions, despite Administration opposition.
In final negotiations, the Senate is pushing its House counterparts to incorporate most of the safeguards sought by commercial interests. One big victory for the corporate coalition came on Nov. 9 when House negotiators agreed to permit businesses or individuals to seek judicial review of national security letters. Senate leaders believe they have an agreement on another top business concern: limiting the power of law enforcement to keep company records on file forever. A tentative deal would require investigators to return or destroy lists they've obtained, such as those covering airline passengers or casino customers, if the terror tip turns out to be a dud.
