Left Side of the Aisle #99 - Part 6

Hero Award: Google

Updated Speaking of the Hero Award, which I was in the case of Bradley Manning, we have one this week. It goes to Google.

Google's corporate motto, supposedly, is "Don't be evil." Unfortunately, it has been evil, such as in its relations with the government of China, but this time it did something right.

Google has revealed that the FBI used National Security Letters, or NSLs, to secretly seek information on Google users.

NSLs are extrajudicial demands for information which are issued by the FBI. They are not warrants; they are neither issued, approved, or overseen by any court; and they can demand personal customer records from, among others, Internet Service Providers, phone companies, banks and other financial institutions, and credit companies. They have been attacked by civil liberties and privacy groups. The ACLU has mounted repeated legal challenges against the section of the Patriot Act that allows for NSLs, the Electronic Privacy Information Center calls them "extraordinary," and the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls them "frightening and invasive."

What makes them particularly evil is that the outfit that receives such a letter can be barred from ever mentioning it got one. The FBI admits to having issued 16,511 National Security Letters in 2011, the last year for which data was available. But that's all we know. How do we as citizens perform any oversight on, how can we intelligently debate, something we can't even know is happening except in the aggregate?

What's happened in this particular case is that Google negotiated with the government and got permission to release some limited information. It's still in the aggregate: All we know is that in each of the last four years, Google got less than 1,000 NSLs involving somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 accounts. As David Kravets of Wired magazine wrote, “Apparently, the terrorists would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to get data about its customers.”

This is only a small step but still, in what shows just how obsessed with secrecy the Obama administration has become, some privacy experts have called it “an unprecedented win for transparency.”

So yes, it's a small step but Google took it - and it is the only technology company which has. So good on Google.

Sources:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/06/fbi-ecretly-spying-on-google-users-company-reveals/
http://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty/national-security-letters
https://epic.org/privacy/nsl/
https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters

Updated to say it was embarrassing that just hours after I recorded this show,  I saw the news that Google had admitted repeatedly violating people's privacy in its Street View project and in the course of reading about that I learned that it is one of the tech giants trying to block the European Union from enacting stricter privacy regulations.

Big sigh.

I was tempted to take the award back - but even the worst among us can occasionally do the right thing, and that's what the Hero Award is about: not about being a moral avatar, but about having at some point done the right thing. And in the case of the NSLs, Google did the right thing. So the award stands. Doesn't mean Google is not back on my shit list.