Revealed: What Info the FBI Can Collect With a National Security Letter

An anonymous reader writes with this lead from Help Net Security's story on a topic we've touched on here many times: the broad powers arrogated by the Federal government in the form of National Security Letters: On Monday, after winning an eleven-year legal battle, Nicholas Merrill can finally tell the public how the FBI has secretly construed its authority to issue National Security Letters (NSLs) to permit collection of vast amounts of private information on US citizens without a search warrant or any showing of probable cause. The PATRIOT Act vastly expanded the domestic reach of the NSL program, which allows the FBI to compel disclosure of information from online companies and forbid recipients from disclosing they have received an NSL. The FBI has refused to detail publicly the kinds of private data it believes it can obtain with an NSL. A key sentence from the same story: "Merrill is now able to reveal that the FBI believes it can force online companies to turn over the following information simply by sending an NSL demanding it: an individual’s complete web browsing history; the IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with; and records of all online purchases." Reader Advocatus Diaboli adds this, from The Intercept: One of the most striking revelations, Merrill said during a press teleconference, was that the FBI was requesting detailed cell site location information — cellphone tracking records — under the heading of "radius log" information. Traditionally, radius log refers to a user's attempts to connect to a server or a DSL line — a sort of anachronism given the progress of technology. "The notion that the government can collect cellphone location information — to turn your cellphone into a tracking device, just by signing a letter — is extremely troubling," Merrill said.

Comments

Troubling?

[fustakrakich]

What's troubling is that people allow it to happen. The polls all say that they want it. The reelection rates confirm it.

Re:Troubling?

[fizzer06]

"Article the sixth...

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Re: Troubling?

[ememisya]

What are you, some kind of constitutionalist weirdo? Those are old documents, you ain't got no such rights. As long as you are against pointless surveillance, you'll be monitored. What are you hiding? On the list you go.

Re: Troubling?

[MyAlternateID]

That's a lot like saying, "Some people don't like freedom."

A lot of people really don't like freedom. Real liberty might mean that other people can do things you don't approve of. They might adopt a lifestyle you don't like. They might want to marry a same-sex partner. They might want to smoke a joint in their own home. They might want to have consentual sex between adult people in which money is involved, or a position other than missionary. A willing buyer might want to purchase alcohol from a willing seller on a Sunday. Someone might want to own a gun in certain areas, or carry that gun concealed, both with no intention of shooting anyone unless mortally threatened. They might want to buy raw milk with a full understanding of any risk involved. They might want to collect rainwater. They might want to install roll bars (a safety feature) on their vehicle. They might want to generate their own electricity and go off-grid without the city condemning their property.

In some parts of the world they might want to practice an unapproved religion, educate their daughters, hear a woman sing, or explore their feelings for another consenting adult of the same sex.

All of these things are illegal somewhere. The urge to pry into the lives of others and worry about what other people are doing, how they are living, and find ways to stop them is rampant. There are large numbers of small-minded busybodies who seem to have no lives of their own, thus they need a piece of someone else's. Achieving the force of law is their ultimate wet dream. They like "freedom" when it means "things I personally approve of", which makes a mockery of what freedom actually is. Yes, one can reasonably conclude that lots and lots of people really don't like freedom.

If these UFOs people keep reporting actually are advanced aliens from a distant star system, it's no wonder they don't make open contact. They're looking down at us and saying, "clearly they aren't ready yet. All they seem to care about is controlling each other. They most admire the ones who are best at it, calling them great leaders."

Re: Troubling?

[Holi]

People did not vote on this. We are not a direct democracy. Our representatives voted on this, all of them, regardless of how you, their constituents, feel about it. Why? because we are no longer a representative democracy. We are rapidly shifting to a representative oligarchy where, regardless of who you elect, they do the bidding of those who paid for their seat.

The perception of corruption was the reason behind our campaign reforms, but with the current Court now limiting it to direct quid pro quo all those restrictions become unconstitutional, and all your votes become meaningless.

Re: Troubling?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

There he is! The leftist who declares we should not be bound by 200 year old documents, because it gets in the way of the arrogation of power into the government, the kinds of which dictators like. He fancies himself better than they, and a wise wielder of it, and that there is no danger of it ever being used to form a dictatorship, so it's safe.

You ask the wrong question. Do not ask "What else from 1776 would you use?" That is a fraud's rhetorical device.

Ask instead what problem they were trying to solve, based on thousands of years of observation.

They sought to strip the power of kings to use the power of government to maintain power. Hence not just things like freedom of speech, but the absolutist wording of it, to prevent creeping control, of the type we currently see in Europe and elsewhere in nominally free countries.

Each item has deep and well-debated reasoning behind it. You need warrants to prevent government from rooting through your stuff to hamper political opponents. You need specific warrants, as opposed to general ones, for the same reason.

The best you can say about the current state is it relies on an outdated, landline era telephony concept where "people had no expectation of privacy in corporate business records of their calls", needed for billing.

Well that has shifted with Internet/cloud concept. As people shift "their papers" online, out of their house and off their body, they shift with it an expectation of privacy.

Re:Troubling?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I also point out the idiocy of the "metadata" concept in relation to constitutional design. In this cas, good old King George III would indeed have happily warrantlessly tracked founding father phone calls to see who was in their network.

As such the founding fathers would have banned it, sans warrant.

Again, warrants are all we ask. Do not build the tools of dictatorship. Disallow government those powers. That is the central constitutional design principle.

Re: Troubling?

[dryeo]

The truth is that the old document can use some updates. Examples include adding electronic documents to the 4th, explicitly listing the cases where government can limit speech such as national security and perhaps child porn. These are cases where the courts have extended the Constitution (or didn't) in ad hoc ways.
Discussion can also start on issues like is it OK for businesses to violate your rights, and if so, is it OK for them to do it for the government. Then there are questions about whether you own your data.
The American Constitution is a fine document but has suffered bitrot and you get the courts making rulings like how the 1st only protects some speech which sets a precedent that can be extended in the future.
Even simple things like is the Air Force constitutional. The constitution mentions defence but gives different powers to Congress to form a navy and an army with the idea of a standing army discouraged (at the time it was recognized that a standing army often led to tyranny and a militia was a superior option). Would have been really easy to amend the Constitution to allow an Air force rather then once again depending on the courts interpretation.
There are other parts such as the Interstate commerce clause that may be better defined as well.

No Surprises

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no surprises. Everything that they have revealed has been known or suspected by anyone that gave it any real thought.

Also no surprise... The VAST majority of American citizens are to self-centered to care. They just don't care! 'It's not happening to me(that I know of) and I don't give a flying fuck about you.'

People are too stupid to care. This situation will get a hell of a lot worse before anyone tries to do anything about it. The perfect example is last Sunday's lie that the NSA was ceasing broad collection. Nobody knows about it, even fewer care about it and the NSA sure as hell didn't stop shit! But, who cares, right?

Re: No Surprises

[ememisya]

Most people are too scared to say anything at all so that they don't have their lives intruded upon.

Re: No Surprises

[geekmux]

Most people are too scared to say anything at all so that they don't have their lives intruded upon.

Uh, I hate to burst your bubble here, but most people are actually overbearing narcissists addicted to social media who are hell-bent on ensuring their online lives intrude upon yours.

We're in the middle of a discussion about intelligence agencies acting illegally under citizens that ignore it. Don't try and paint the average citizen as suddenly caring about privacy or legality, because they could give a shit about either.

What is metadata?

[swillden]

NSLs are restricted to allowing collection only of "non-content information", or metadata. But what does that mean? In the case of telephone calls, it's pretty clear. With web history, though, it's much less clear, because a list of URLs is a list not only of which servers you connected to, but in most cases also what information you retrieved. The URL doesn't contain the information itself, but it's trivial for someone else to retrieve it and find out what you read.

Cell location information is another debatable case. While in some sense it is metadata if we consider the content to be what you talk about on the phone, the data you send/receive, etc., it's also tantamount to having a tracking device on almost everyone. Courts have ruled that GPS tracking without a warrant is unconstitutional, and it really seems that this is the same thing. The precision is lower, but it's still pretty darned good.

As for purchases, it would seem that information about what you bought and how much you paid for it would constitute "content", while the times and locations of the transactions would be metadata.

IP addresses of people you corresponded with... that seems like pure metadata, and is unsurprising to me.

TIL: The FBI learned how to increase system noise

[gestalt_n_pepper]

The result of this strategy, of course, is a small population of ever more skilled people who can hide illegal activities via encryption, message splitting, or other methods, while making the noise (i.e. banal, legal activity) more voluminous, easy to get, expensive to process, and meaningless.

Truly troubling

[chihowa]

The FBI has refused to detail publicly the kinds of private data it believes it can obtain with an NSL.

The truly troubling part is not the specifics of what they collect, but the fact that they think that they should operate with no accountability to the citizenry. A government operating on secret interpretations of laws is entirely at odds with a democratic system.

Re:Truly troubling

[Fire_Wraith]

This is it exactly.

We're never going to be able to completely put the genie back in the bottle short of throwing away all of our phones and computers. The communications, the data, it's out there. Furthermore, just like there are times we want the FBI/Police etc to get a wiretap, there are times we'd want them to be able to monitor someone. That's never been the concern - it's always been about accountability and oversight.

The government, be it FBI/DOJ or NSA/CIA/etc, shouldn't have the power to freely go demanding, let alone collect and store, all of this stuff without some kind of external oversight, just like they've been prevented from freely coming into your house and going through your personal papers. If they really have cause to do so, they can go to a judge and get a warrant. That won't prevent every abuse, sure, but it at least provides a paper trail and accountability for later, as well as the means to challenge that original action if the FBI/etc goes overboard.

Re:What is truly "troubling"

[whoever57]

Another part that is troubling, but also interesting, is that various courts have already decided that gathering some of this data without a warrant is unconstitutional. Just because an NSL is used to get the data doesn't magically make it legal.

Re:TIL: The FBI learned how to increase system noi

[currently_awake]

The Paris attack happened because the intelligence agencies are spending so much time/money/manpower spying on "law abiding" citizens that they don't have time to actively watch the known troublemakers. The Paris attackers were on watch lists, they were known to be a threat.

Re:NSL = for things that DO NOT require a warrant

[ISoldat53]

Wonderful, but if the NSL is truly for National Security, make it illegal to use information gained using one in a domestic criminal investigation or give it to any corporation for their commercial use.

What?

[s.petry]

I have no idea who your generalization is supposed to be covering. "Most" people would fall into the original comment. People who are too brainwashed to do anything, or care about anything, that the media does not tell them to do, or care, about. Mindless drones who sit staring at a 2.5x3" screen occasionally banging it with their thumbs. Reading 100 character strings for their life philosophy, and shouting down anyone that disagrees with their 140 character and 2 meme opinion.

I wish that was a scary exaggeration by Alex Jones or something, but sadly it's not. I have a kid in the UC system, relatives in U of Michigan Ann Arbor, and the last few places I work has built in social media systems with as many SJWs as you can find on Reddit's worst thread.

There is a minority of people that read and study beyond main stream media. Those people were pissed about the NSA dirt but had ideas ahead of time that it was happening. Those people were pissed about torture sites but had suspicions. We knew the wars in the middle east were based on fabrications, but we know what Eurasia is. There may be a majority of this extreme minority who would be frightened to speak publicly (I'm a skeptic but would be okay with this generalization).