In a pretty much unprecedented move, Google today announced that it was expanding its regular “Transparency Report” to include some very general information about government demands for user information using National Security Letters, which can be issued by the head of any of 56 FBI field offices without judicial approval or supervision. Recipients of NSLs are typically forbidden from ever revealing even the existence of the request, and therefore not included in the company’s general tally of government surveillance requests. Instead of disclosing specific numbers of NSL requests, then, Google is publishing a wide range indicating the rough volume of requests they get each year, and how many users are affected. Broad as these ranges are, there’s some interesting points to be gleaned here:
It’s illuminating to compare the minimum number of users affected by NSLs each year to the numbers we find in the government’s official annual reports. In 2011—the last year for which we have a tally—the Justice Department acknowledged issuing 16,511 NSLs seeking information about U.S. persons, with a total of 7,201 Americans’ information thus obtained. That’s actually down from a staggering 14,212 Americans whose information DOJ reported obtaining via NSL the previous year. Remember, this total includes National Security Letters issued not just to all telecommunications providers—including online services like Google, broadband Internet companies, and cell phone carriers—but also “financial institutions,” which are defined broadly to include a vast array of businesses beyond such obvious candidates as banks and credit card companies.
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