National Security Letter

A National Security Letter is a simple form document signed by an official of the FBI or other agencies, with no prior judicial approval, compelling disclosure of sensitive information held by banks, credit companies, telephone carriers and Internet service providers, among others. Recipients of NSLs are usually gagged from disclosing the fact or nature of a request. The USA PATRIOT Act eliminated any effective standard for issuing NSLs. It wiped away the requirement that the information being sought “pertain to” a foreign power or the agent of a foreign power. This requirement used to protect information about Americans because few are agents of a foreign government, a foreign terrorist organization, or another foreign power. Instead, today it is sufficient for the FBI merely to assert that the records are “relevant to” an investigation to protect against international terrorism or foreign espionage. The USA PATRIOT Act also eliminated the statutory requirement that agents have any factual basis for seeking records. In 2003, Congress dramatically expanded the types of “financial institutions” on which an NSL can be served to include travel agencies, real estate agents, jewelers, the Postal Service, insurance companies, casinos, car dealers, and other businesses not normally considered “financial institutions.” In addition, advances in technology have made more “digital footprints” more readily available to the government through its NSL authority. For example, the government reportedly used its NSL authority to seek casino and hotel records about hundreds of thousands of travelers who stayed in Las Vegas on a recent New Years Eve &mdash; a data dump difficult to do and difficult to sort through without recent advances in technology.