Slashdot Mirror
Google Publishes Eight National Security Letters (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google dropped a single National Security Letter into its most recent transparency report without much fanfare, but today the company published eight more NSLs in an attempt to shed more light on government surveillance of Google users. The eight letters published today were sent to Google from FBI offices across the country. Cumulatively, the NSLs seek broad access to content for around 20 user accounts. The names of the targets are redacted, but most of the letters seek access to Gmail accounts. The NSLs were sent to Google over a five-year period, from 2010 to 2015, with the majority coming from the Charlotte, North Carolina field office of the FBI. Others came from Florida, Arizona, New York, and California. "In our continued effort to increase transparency around government demands for user data, today we begin to make available to the public the National Security Letters (NSLs) we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations," Richard Salgado, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, wrote in a blog post. Google has fought to make the letters public in part because the FBI can issue them without prior judicial oversight.
One wonders why they want access to these emails.
They have some legitimate reasons, like the fact that in a multicultural society every group wants to dominate every other, and terrorism is a good way.
They could also be entirely nonsense, pursuing little old ladies for downloading unlicensed episodes of "C.H.I.P.S."
No one will tell the whole story.
End times democracy, business as usual.
Alternative Right.
..... see how we PULL OUR PANTS DOWN n SHOW em TO YOU!!!!!
Why not publish all 26?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That has to be on the order of the likelihood of a Powerball winner.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I, for one, simply can not wait for Bush to be out of the White House.
Did you hear Obama's an actual Constitutional scholar? HE'LL put an end to this nonsense!
>we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations,"
OK, I'm not sure that NSL's were ever meant to be binding in perpetuity, so releasing them whenever the FBI officially closes an investigation doesn't seem that big of a deal. Plus, the NSL's are basically form letters only differing on information about the users accounts the FBI wants to examine. When you have seen one NSL, you've pretty much have seen them all.
Hmm.. Fascinating stuff, I guess. But I'm not sure I would have chose the word "broad" to describe the level of information requested by at least some of these NSL's. I looked at a few, two of them simply wanted name, address and length of service, nothing else. Another asked for that, and a history of communication transactions, even goes out of the way to say 'don't give us subject lines, or content, we can't look at that," and for a very specific datetime window.
So, not exactly pleased with puffing up this by saying 'broad access', when as far as I can tell, it's anything but.
... are people going to stop using email?
God
Damn
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The redaction of email address is inept. One can easily count the number of redacted characters in the email address. So while it does not reveal the email address it certainly can be used to eliminate millions of email addresses that were not the target. The entire line should have been redacted. Better to redact an excess of characters.
Didn't the USA fight two separate wars to end this kind of behavior?