By Danny Fenster
ticklethewire.com
The FBI has not been getting the response it is used to.
The Washington Post reports that, increasingly, many communications companies have not been disclosing the kind of information previously offered from FBI requests.
Investigators have routinely used national security letters to get information about who sent and received e-mails and the Web sites individuals visit.
But recently, reports Ellen Nakashima of the Post, in response to letters-which can be issued from the authority of field offices and oblige the recipient to keep quiet about the request-many service providers are limiting the information they give to customers’ names, addresses, length of service and phone billing records.
“Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored” more expansive requests, FBI officials wrote in an August response to Senate Judiciary Committee questions, according to the Post.
To get the information they used to get form the letters, the FBI has increasingly been turning to the courts, seeking what are called business record requests, the Post reports. More than 80 percent of all such court orders were for Internet records that would have previously been granted with the original letters in the past, according to the Post. Last year the FBI made four times as many court requests than the year before-96 compared to 21.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a measure to let the FBI use national security letters to obtain “dialing, routing, addressing and signaling information,” but not the contents of e-mail or other communications, angering some privacy rights activists.
“Our view is data like e-mail ‘to-from’ information is so sensitive that it ought to be available only with a court order,” Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Post
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