I invoked him yesterday, and I’m invoking him again today, Nelson Muntz joins all of us as we point at the DOJ and the FBI and give a collective "Ha ha!"

US District Judge Victor Marrero said the Patriot Act, as it stands, "offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers."

No wonder the Justice Department gave such a silly statement about Net Neutrality yesterday. They were upset about getting their National Security Letters revoked and that caused them to make some weird Post Office analogy for the Internet.

 Now I get it.

Nancy Pelosi talked tough during election season, but it appears that’s all it was – just talk.

Not only is the EFF trying to remind the government, citizens, and AT&T that the Constitution forbids such practices, they’re also throwing the fact that AT&T, eighty years ago, actually took the side of the citizens.

In 1928, when the telephone was proliferating throughout the US, AT&T likened government surveillance of phone lines to the writs of assistance issued by King George II and III authorizing searches of anyone, anywhere, whether or not they were suspected of a crime.

If you remember your American history, this was one of the "abuses and usurpations" that made it necessary for the British colonies in America "to dissolve the political which" had connected them. In short, it was a cause for revolution.

So when the question of wiretapping came to the Supreme Court’s attention in 1928, AT&T filed an amicus brief against the United States.

Excerpted from that, as the EFF’s Derek Slater shows, is the following:

"The telephone companies deplore the use of their facilities in furtherance of any criminal or wrongful enterprise. But it was not solicitude for law breakers that caused the people of the United States to ordain the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as part of the Constitution…. [I]t is better that a few criminals escape than that the privacies of life of all the people be exposed to the agents of the government, who will act at their own discretion, the honest and the dishonest, unauthorized and unrestrained by courts.

"The telephone has become part and parcel of the social and business intercourse of the people of the United States, and this telephone system offers a means of espionage to which general warrants and writs of assistance were the puniest instruments of tyranny and oppression."

It begs the question: What has happened to Ma Bell over the last century that it would repeatedly take sides against the wishes and rights of the American public? And what happened to the ideals of government we set up so long ago?

My guess: Money happened. Lots of it.

Slater concludes:

AT&T isn’t the only one in need of a history lesson; Congress is, too, and it’s up to each and every one of us to set our representatives straight. By passing horrible legislation last week permitting the warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, Congress failed to do its job and check the Executive’s abuse of power. Now we must do our democratic duty and help restore our Constitutional rights.

And I conclude with a quote from the man that wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion… We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?"

Looks like we’ve waited far too long.

The most recent entity to learn (or is about to learn) this lesson is none other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which stared the down the business end of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

And so, the EFF, after making the FBI get its ass in the kitchen and make some pot pie, got a hold of some 1138 pages-worth of National Security Letters (NSL) issued from one room at the FBI headquarters, the soon to be notorious Room 4944.

This room is also known as the Communications Analysis Unit, reports Wired, and is where FBI Executive Assistant Director Larry Mefford, in charge of the counterterrorism division, likes to hang out, and it just so happens a lot of the NSLs have his name on them.

NSLs are basically letters granted under the controversial Patriot Act that allow national security agents to demand information and records from Internet service providers (ISPs), telephone companies, and even librarians about constituents.

American citizen constituents.

The EFF isn’t hoarding this information, though. The organization has posted them online and is asking for help from bloggers to investigate. The documents are downloadable with the searchable text from the EFF’s website.

"We’ve had over 8000 downloads so far," D’Andrade wrote yesterday, "and the blogosphere is starting to light up with feedback and analysis of the documents."