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Google Publishes Eight National Security Letters (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the take-matters-into-your-own-hands dept.

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.

2 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. I can't wait for Bush to leave the White House by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  2. Broad access? by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.