As part of Google's commitment to transparency in relation to the government's requests to obtain user data, the company on Tuesday published eight National Security Letters (NSL) penned by the FBI, and received by Google either through litigation or legislation.
The letters Google has published were sent from different FBI offices across the country, including North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, New York, and California. The letters seek broad accessibility to content tied to around 20 user accounts. Google has redacted the usernames as a privacy measure, and a spokesperson for the company has said that the targeted individuals have been notified.
National Security Letters
The NSLs were sent by the FBI over five years, beginning 2010 to 2015. NSLs are usually barred from public disclosure, but because of the recently passed USA Freedom Act, tech companies have now been able to publish the contents of NSLs, albeit piecemeal. The first major tech company to publish NSLs was Yahoo, which had published three of them back in June. Google and the Internet Archive have since followed suit.
"As we have described in the past, we have fought for the right to be transparent about our receipt of NSLs," Richard Salgado, Google's law enforcement and information security director, said in a blog post.
What Was The FBI Trying To Obtain?
In most cases, FBI can only obtain names, addresses, and the length of occupation an account has spent in a particular platform, in this case, Google. But in two of the NSLs published, the FBI gunned for "electronic communications transactional records" tied to the account. This category may include IP addresses relative to the user's location when the service was accessed, although it does not include contents of the emails.
All eight orders were justified under Executive Order 12333, a controversial decree used to greenlight domestic web surveillance, also tagged as a way for the NSA to spy on civilians.
Google has been in a deep commitment to make NSLs public partly because the FBI can skip judicial oversight and issue them regardless. Since user information contains a trove of personal and important data, many tech companies have argued that mining it should be first authorized by a court.
Google has said that it will soon create a permanent home of sorts, one that's dedicated to viewing NSLs and similar disclosures as part of its transparency report.
But while Google is encouraged by this recent development, it simply won't stop there.
"[W]e will remain vigilant in opposing legislation that would significantly expand the universe of information that can be obtained with an NSL," Salgado said.
