{"id":8465,"date":"2013-03-07T10:38:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:14:15","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T10:14:15","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=8465","title":{"rendered":"Fox News: FBI ‘secretly spying’ on Google users, company reveals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fox News: FBI ‘secretly spying’ on Google users, company reveals<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The FBI used National Security Letters — a form of surveillance that privacy watchdogs call \u201cfrightening and invasive\u201d — to surreptitiously seek information on Google users, the web giant has just revealed.<\/p>\n

FFF.org: Google\u2019s disclosure is \u201can unprecedented win for transparency,\u201d privacy experts said Wednesday. But it\u2019s just one small step forward.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSerious concerns and questions remain about the use of NSLs,\u201d the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s Dan Auerbach and Eva Galperin wrote. For one thing, the agency issued 16,511 National Security Letters in 2011, the last year for which data was available. But Google was gagged from saying just how many letters it received — leaving key questions unanswered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

EFF.org too: <\/p>\n

Google Transparency Report Highlights Just How Much We Don’t Know About National Security Letters<\/p>\n

In an unprecedented win for transparency, yesterday Google began publishing generalized information about the number of National Security Letters that the company received in the past year as well as the total number of user accounts affected by those requests. Of all the dangerous government surveillance powers that were expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act, the National Security Letter (NSL) power provided by five statutory provisions is one of the most frightening and invasive. These letters–the type served on communications service providers such as phone companies and ISPs and are authorized by 18 U.S.C. 2709–allow the FBI to secretly demand data about ordinary American citizens’ private communications and Internet activity without any prior judicial review. To make matters worse, recipients of NSLs are subject to gag orders that forbid them from ever revealing the letters’ existence to anyone.<\/p>\n

Google has led the way among large companies in providing transparency with respect to legal and law enforcement requests with its transparency report, but until now, it has always left NSL requests out of its tally of requests for user data, in part, presumably, due to concerns about the accompanying gag order. …\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}