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Tag: National Security Letters

  • Senators Express Alarm Over FBI Secretly Demanding Data From Credit Agencies

    Senators Express Alarm Over FBI Secretly Demanding Data From Credit Agencies

    Documents have come to light exposing the FBI’s practice of secretly demanding information about Americans from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

    According to a report by TechCrunch, the FBI has been using “legal powers — known as national security letters — to compel credit giants to turn over non-content information, such as records of purchases and locations, that the agency deems necessary in national security investigations. But these letters have no judicial oversight and are typically filed with a gag order, preventing the recipient from disclosing the demand to anyone else — including the target of the letter.”

    Tech companies have been dealing with national security letters for some time but, following the Edward Snowden revelations, the laws were changed in 2015 to give companies the right to petition for release from the gag orders. As a result, tech companies routinely publish transparency reports, disclosing how many times the government has requested their assistance.

    In the wake of these documents becoming public, at least three senators have expressed concern. Republican senator Rand Paul and Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren have written letters to the three credit agencies, questioning why the agencies have never disclosed the FBI’s requests.

    “Because your company holds so much potentially sensitive data on so many Americans and collects this information without obtaining consent from these individuals, you have a responsibility to be transparent about how you handle that data,” the letters said. “Unfortunately, your company has not provided information to policymakers or the public about the type or the number of disclosures that you have made to the FBI.”

    Senator Wyden, in particular, has been a vocal proponent of privacy protections and an equally vocal critic of questionable and illegal spying on American citizens. With these new revelations, it’s a safe bet there will be more inquiries and possible regulation to govern how the financial and credit information of Americans can be accessed and used.

  • Twitter Would Like to Be More Transparent, If They Could

    Twitter has just released their fifth-ever transparency report, and it shows that requests for user data, content removal, and copyright takedowns are all on the rise.

    But the main focus of Twitter’s announcement isn’t really the report itself – instead, Twitter takes a lot of care to express their unhappiness with the US government, specifically the Department of Justice and their rules on how and how much information about national security requests can be revealed to users.

    “As we alluded to in our last post, earlier this year we met with officials from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington to push for our ability to provide greater transparency concerning national security requests. Specifically, if the government will not allow us to publish the actual number of requests, we want the freedom to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be more meaningful to Twitter’s users, and more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive,” says Twitter.

    Twitter references DOJ guidelines that limit how specific service providers can be when discussing national security requests with users. For instance, when reporting on the number of National Security Letters received, companies can only report in “bands of 1,000.” It’s the same for FISA requests. That’s why you’ll see some companies report these numbers as “we’ve received (0 – 999) requests of this nature.”

    Like Google, who began including the incredibly unspecific volume of national security requests in its Transparency Reports back in March of last year.

    Twitter, on the other hand, would rather not include this information at all if they are going to be handcuffed to such an extreme.

    “Unfortunately, we were not able to make any progress at this meeting, and we were not satisfied with the restrictions set forth by the DOJ. So in early April, we sent a draft midyear Transparency Report to DOJ that presented relevant information about national security requests, and asked the Department to return it to us, indicating which information (if any) is classified or otherwise cannot lawfully be published. At this point, over 90 days have passed, and we still have not received a reply.”

    And so, Twitter’s transparency report has no info on national security requests.

    What is does show is that worldwide, there has been a 46 percent increase in governmental user data requests, a 14 percent increase in content removal requests, and a 38 percent increase in copyright takedown requests.

    You can read the whole report here.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • LinkedIn Challenges Government Secrecy in Court

    LinkedIn Challenges Government Secrecy in Court

    With the recent revelations surrounding the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) widespread surveillance of the internet, online privacy concerns have become more widespread in recent months. This is especially true for social media, as the open nature of websites such as Twitter and Facebook makes it even easier for governments to compile information about citizens.

    LinkedIn this week released its bi-annual Transparency Report, something it and a handful of other social media websites do on a regular basis. However, with the nature of NSA surveillance now public, LinkedIn is attempting to come forward with the part it plays in the U.S. government’s national security-related demands for company information. Unfortunately, the government not only prevents companies from releasing such information, but it also prohibits those same companies from even acknowledging how many of those requests have been made. It’s an issue that even Google has had to deal with in recent years.

    Erika Rottenberg, general counsel for LinkedIn, revealed in a LinkedIn blog post this week that the company has been fighting to release the exact number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests it receives. From the blog post:

    Unfortunately, our Transparency Report doesn’t include requests related to U.S. national security-related matters. This is because the U.S. government prohibits us from doing so. We believe our members and the LinkedIn community deserve to know this information, especially in light of recent revelations about the nature of U.S. government surveillance. We’ve been in discussions with the U.S. government for months in an effort to convince them to allow us to release these numbers as part of our Transparency Report and these discussions recently reached an impasse.

    With no other options, LinkedIn has decided to take legal action against such secrecy. The company this week filed a petition with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to publish the exact number of FISA requests it receives. LinkedIn has also requested that its petition hearing be public. A similar request has also been filed with the FBI.

    In addition to the petition, LinkedIn has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The brief is regarding a case about the gag orders that accompany National Security Letters, and argues that such restrictions are not required to maintain national security.