National Security Letters and the Internet Archive

Deven Desai writes in Concurring Opinions:

Wired reports that the FBI sub­poe­naed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive’s founder) pro­vide records about one of the library’s reg­is­tered users, ask­ing for the user’s name, address and activ­ity on the site. The FBI used a National Security Letter (exam­ple) to make the request. As Wired explains this type of let­ter does not require judge’s review before issu­ing it and often (almost always) has a gag order “for­bid­ding the recip­i­ent from ever speak­ing of the sub­poena, except to a lawyer.” The Archive, EFF, and the ACLU went to court and had the sub­poena quashed.

As I argue in Property, Persona, and Preservation, given that our infor­ma­tion is more and more tech­no­log­i­cally medi­ated, we need bet­ter sys­tems to pre­serve our infor­ma­tion. This case raises a
related issue of once pre­served what can be done with the information.

Here, the Archive is pre­serv­ing the infor­ma­tion and then as a library
allow­ing peo­ple to use that infor­ma­tion. But because of the method of
access, the FBI was able to ask for great detail about who looked at
what infor­ma­tion and when. Julie Cohen’s A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at “Copyright Management” In Cyberspace offers an expla­na­tion as to why the Archive’s win is so impor­tant. In short, read­ing anony­mously involves iden­tity of the reader and how we fos­ter “free­dom of thought and expression.”