Google Reveals Some Data About National Security Letters, May Have Exposed DOJ Duplicity
from the transparency... dept
We've talked for years about the government's use of "national security letters" or NSLs, which are effectively a way for law enforcement types to seek information with less oversight than a subpoena, and which usually come with a very, very extreme gag order attached. Despite the fact that, by their own admission, law enforcement has regularly and systematically abused this tool, they are still widely used and there has been little effort to block the abuses. Google's latest transparency report is seeking to reveal some data about the NSLs it has received, but without revealing too much. Rather than directly revealing how many NSLs it has received, it is posting ranges (in bunches of 1,000) -- and apparently the company got at least some level of approval from the government to do this ("We're thankful to U.S. government officials for working with us").By itself, the data doesn't seem that enlightening.
Sanchez wonders if the DOJ is effectively under-counting how many NSLs it uses by pretending that some of the NSLs they issue shouldn't count towards its official tally of NSLs.It's illuminating to compare the minimum number of users affected by NSLs each year to the numbers we find in the government's official annual reports. In 2011—the last year for which we have a tally—the Justice Department acknowledged issuing 16,511 NSLs seeking information about U.S. persons, with a total of 7,201 Americans' information thus obtained. That's actually down from a staggering 14,212 Americans whose information DOJ reported obtaining via NSL the previous year. Remember, this total includes National Security Letters issued not just to all telecommunications providers—including online services like Google, broadband Internet companies, and cell phone carriers—but also "financial institutions," which are defined broadly to include a vast array of businesses beyond such obvious candidates as banks and credit card companies.
What ought to leap out at you here is the magnitude of Google's tally relative to that total: They got requests affecting at least 1,000 users in a year when DOJ reports just over 7,000 Americans affected by all NSLs—and it seems impossible that Google could account for anywhere remotely near a seventh of all NSL requests. Google, of course, is not limiting their tally to requests for information about Americans, which may explain part of the gap—but we know that, at least of a few years ago, the substantial majority of NSLs targeted Americans, and the proportion of the total targeting Americans was increasing year after year. As of 2006, for instance, 57 percent of NSL requests were for information about U.S. persons. So even if we reduce Google's minimum proportionately, that seems awfully high.
There's a simple enough explanation for this apparent discrepancy: The numbers DOJ reports each year explicitly exclude NSL requests for “basic subscriber information,” meaning the “name, address, and length of service” associated with an account, and only count more expansive requests that also demand more detailed “electronic communications transactional records” that are “parallel to” the “toll billing records” maintained by traditional phone companies.That would mean that the NSL number that the DOJ reports is not particularly accurate, and that the FBI really issues a hell of a lot more NSLs (not so). Shocking reveal of the day: the DOJ may not be entirely forthright about how often it's spying on Americans using a widely abused process with little oversight.
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Filed Under: doj, fbi, national security letters, nsls, privacy, transparency
Companies: google
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This limited hang-out doesn't mean Google can be trusted.
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I thought more people would understand that Google giving people a unique identifying cookie made it easier to spy on citizens for a government that doesn't need that power.
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Re: This limited hang-out doesn't mean Google can be trusted.
out_of_the_blue is fully correct to not trust google at all.
"insightfull" button pressed.
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You can go elsewhere and readily find examples of the government cheating on numbers to make things sound better. The first two that come to mind is unemployment figures, where if you're unemployed over a year and quit looking, magically you are no longer unemployed. Or you could look at the mystical moving measuring stick that is used to figure out inflation. That measuring stick has changed at least 6 times but the older figures are never re-adjusted to take into account the newest method. Doing it that way gives you the impression when you look at this unadjusted figures by graph that it's a steady slow sloping rise. That's just figures that everyone gets to look at.
When you throw in that no one can talk about it because of the NSLs. That no judge or court is overseeing the real need to break into private records, it leaves it wide open to abuse. Small wonder the figures aren't even in the ball park. Every time there has been a check on if the system has been used legally, it always comes up with multiple violations that take advantage of this.
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wait wait wait...
I almost got it... let me try again once I get back in my chair.
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big google
The number of NSL to users affected is the opposite to the ratio the DOJ reports.
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