Today is a good day for privacy advocates everywhere. The Internet Archive, a virtual library of the Internet, has won in a monumental struggle with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In November of last year the FBI sent a letter to the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, demanding extremely sensitive personal information about innocent people without any prior court approval. The letter was sent as a National Security Letter, or NSL, and included a gag order barring Kahle from talking to anyone other than his lawyers about the request.

The NSL program, unknown to many Americans, allows the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to issue administrative subpoenas to U.S. businesses for customer and other personal information. It was begun shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Instead of complying with the invasive request, Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to challenge the subpoena, arguing that the NSL program is unconstitutional.

The FBI withdrew the NSL on April 22, but FBI assistant director John Miller issued a statement about the case Wednesday. “The information requested in the national security letter was relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation,” he said. “National security letters remain indispensable tools for national security investigations and permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.”

We’ve written previously on this topic, in this post on NSA data mining.  More information from Wired here.

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