We continue our discussion of government surveillance and Internet privacy with someone who was under an
FBI
gag order for six years. In early 2004, Nicholas Merrill, who was
running an Internet service provider in New York called Calyx, was
issued a national security letter that ordered him to hand over detailed
private records about some of his customers. Under the law, recipients
of the letters are barred from telling anyone about their encounter with
the
FBI. While Merrill was not the first
American to be gagged after receiving a national security letter, he was
the first to challenge the FBI’s secret tactics. Merrill went to the
American Civil Liberties Union, which then filed the first lawsuit
challenging the national security letter statute. In the lawsuit,
Merrill was simply identified as John Doe. It was only in August 2010,
after reaching a settlement with the
FBI, that Merrill was able to reveal his identity. "[The case] resulted in the national security letter provision of the
PATRIOT
Act being ruled unconstitutional twice," Merrill says. "The problem
was, though, we were never able to get to the Supreme Court to get a
final, binding ruling that would affect the whole country. ... The
concern about cybersecurity and the concerns about privacy are really
two sides of the same coin. There are a lot of really uncontroversial
examples in which organizations and people need confidentiality:
Medicine is one, journalism is another, human rights organizations is an
obvious third. We’re trying to make the case that if the right of
Americans to encrypt their data and to have private information is taken
away, that it’s going to have grave, far-reaching effects on many kinds
of industries, on our democracy as a whole, and our standing in the
world."
Video
Source: democracynow.org
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