National Security Letters

Письма национальной безопасности

Imagine if the FBI could, with only a piece of paper signed by the special agent in charge of your local FBI office, demand detailed information about your private Internet communications directly from your ISP, webmail service, or other communications provider. Imagine that it could do this:

• without court review or approval
• without you being suspected of a crime
• without ever having to tell you that it happened

Further imagine that with this piece of paper, the FBI could see a wide range of private details, including:

• your basic subscriber records, including your true identity and payment information
• your Internet Protocol address and the IP address of every Web server you communicate with
• the identity of anyone using a particular IP address, username, or email address
• the email address or username of everyone you email or IM, or who emails or IMs you
• the time, size in bytes, and duration of each of your communications, and possibly even the web address of every website you visit

Finally, imagine that the FBI could use the same piece of paper to gain access your private credit and financial information — and that your ISP, bank, and any other business from which the FBI gathers your private records is barred by law from notifying you.

Now, stop imagining: the FBI already has this authority, in the form of National Security Letters. These are essentially secret subpoenas that are issued directly by the FBI without any court involvement. Thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act, the only requirement the government must meet to issue an NSL is that the FBI must certify in the letter that the information it is seeking is relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.

The number of National Security Letters used each year is classified, but the Washington Post has reported that by late 2005, the government had on average issued 30,000 National Security Letters each year since the PATRIOT Act passed in 2001. That’s a hundredfold increase over the pre-PATRIOT numbers.

Further revelations by the FBI's Inspector General in 2007 showed that in many cases, the FBI had failed even to meet the weak post-PATRIOT National Security Letter standards, illegally issuing so-called "exigent letters" to communications providers asking for the same information National Security Letters are used to obtain, but without meeting the minimal requirement that the requested information be relevant to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation. EFF has since sued the Department of Justice to learn more about how the government has been abusing its National Security Letter authority.

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