2009: Bush Secret Prisons Still Active Under Obama Administration

Secret Prisons and Gag Orders Continue Under Obama... President Barack Obama took office with a pledge to end secret prisons and minimize government secrecy, but evidence revealed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last week proved he has turned those promises into lies.

President Obama is continuing President Bush's policies of issuing gag orders under the Patriot Act to Internet service providers and has reportedly allowed the Soviet-style disappearance of suspects into prisons that don't officially exist.

President Obama has followed in President Bush's footsteps with regard to the secrecy in the issuance of FBI National Security Letters" under the Patriot Act. National Security Letters are warrantless searches by the FBI that make it a crime for the person or company being searched to reveal that they've been searched. That's been the case with most of the thousands of National Security Letters issued by the FBI every year, including a case by an unknown Internet service provider (ISP) currently before the court. It's even a crime to reveal that you've been issued a National Security Letter, thus the ISP has been forced to sue only in anonymity in a case that originated five years ago. The ISP has sued to end the National Security Letter gag order in the case of John Doe v. Eric Holder, but the Obama administration has sought to deny the courts information that would be necessary for the courts to judge the merits of the case — to judge whether or not national security interests merit the gag order after five years. The ACLU has pointed out that the FBI doesn't even want information from the ISP anymore: The FBI continues to maintain the gag order even though the underlying investigation is more than five years old and even though the FBI abandoned its demand for records from the ISP over two years ago. Yet the Obama administration has kept up the Bush-era fight to gag recipients of FBI National Security Letters.

♥☮❀☠✿