NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times sued Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday, seeking to block the Justice Department from obtaining records of telephone calls between two veteran journalists and their confidential sources.

The lawsuit said the Justice Department was "on the verge" of getting records as part of a probe aimed at learning the identity of government employees who may have provided information to the newspaper. It asked a judge to intervene.

The paper said the government intends to get the records, which reflect confidential communications between the journalists Philip Shenon and Judith Miller and their sources, from third parties unlikely to be interested in challenging its authority.

Last February, two Army counterintelligence agents showed up at the University of Texas law school and demanded to see the roster from a conference on Islamic law held a few days earlier. Their reason: they were trying to track down students who the agents claimed had been asking "suspicious" questions. "I felt like I was in 'Law & Order'," said one student after being grilled by one of the agents. The incident provoked a brief campus uproar, and the Army later admitted the agents had exceeded their authority. But if the Pentagon has its way, the Army may not have to make such amends in the future. Without any public hearing or debate, NEWSWEEK has learned, Defense officials recently slipped a provision into a bill before Congress that could vastly expand the Pentagon's ability to gather intelligence inside the United States, including recruiting citizens as informants.

A man who lost his brother to an unknown serial killer has bankrolled a November ballot measure that would force everyone arrested for a felony in California to provide a DNA sample.

Although backers of the measure say such a greatly expanded DNA database could clear up thousands of unsolved crimes, civil rights activists argue it would give the government access to too much information about too many people.

"DNA is not like a fingerprint, since getting it is more invasive and it holds information beyond mere identification,'' said Tania Simoncelli, a science and technology fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Storing it permanently for future criminal investigations doesn't comply with the Constitution.''

NEW YORK, June 7 (Reuters) - In today's America, prisoners are held incommunicado for years, newspapers can't photograph soldiers' coffins returned from Iraq and the government can secretly track the books citizens read and the movies they watch.

But civil liberties can erode much further before Americans will say enough is enough, say experts in social history and political behavior.

Fear struck by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks helped launch the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of national security, and that fear keeps Americans willing to trade away rights for safety, they say.

ACLU battles FBI over ISP customer data
Lawsuit challenges right to gather information secretly
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:07 p.m. ET April 28, 2004

WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the FBI's use of expanded powers to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers.

A lawsuit challenging secret FBI national security letters was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in New York but not made public until Wednesday because of its extraordinary sensitivity.

The FBI can issue national security letters, or NSLs, without a judge's approval in terrorism and espionage cases. They require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers.

Privacy concerns prompted Congress to kill the Pentagon's $54 million Total Information Awareness program last September, but government computers are still scanning a vast array of databases for clues about criminal or terrorist activity, the General Accounting Office found.

Overall, 36 of the government's 199 "data mining" efforts collect personal information from the private sector, a move experts say could violate civil liberties if left unchecked.

Several appear to be patterned after Total Information Awareness, which critics said could have led to an Orwellian surveillance state in which citizens have little privacy.

"I believe that Total Information Awareness is continuing under other names, and the (Defense Department) projects listed here might fit that bill," said Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor who served as the Clinton administration's top privacy official.

Defense Department officials did not respond to a request for comment.
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If many members of Congress failed to read the Patriot Act during its swift passage, it is in part because that act is almost unreadable. The Patriot Act is written as an extended sequence of additions to and deletions from previously existing statutes. In making these alterations, it often instructs the bewildered reader to insert three words into paragraph X of statute Y without ever providing the full sentence that is altered either in its original or its amended form. Only someone who had scores of earlier statutes open to the relevant pages could step painstakingly through the revisions.
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The hundreds of additions and deletions do, despite appearances, have a coherent and unitary direction: many of them increase the power of the Justice Department and decrease the rights of individual persons. The constitutional rights abridged by the Patriot Act are enumerated in the town resolutions, which most often specify violations of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly, the Fourth Amendment guarantee against search and seizure, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process, and (cited somewhat less often) the Sixth and Eighth Amendment guarantees of a speedy and public trial and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.

"It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."

» Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act (washingtonpost.com)