No Warrant Needed To Read Your E-mail

An EFF press release notes,

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) yesterday filed a friend-of-the court brief supporting the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a suit challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters (NSLs). Authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act and issued directly by FBI agents without any court supervision and without a show of probable cause, the letters are used to demand detailed information about people's private Internet communications from ISPs, web mail providers, and other communications service providers. The people whose communications are searched are not notified, and every letter is accompanied by a gag order that prohibits the letter's recipient from ever revealing its existence.

"Before PATRIOT, the FBI could use National Security Letters only for securing the records of suspected terrorists or spies," said EFF Attorney and Equal Justice Works Fellow Kevin Bankston. "Now the FBI can use them to get private records about anybody it thinks could be relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation, without ever having to show probable cause to a judge."

Full release.