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arXiv · 2403.02768

An Empirical Analysis on the Use and Reporting of National Security Letters

Alex Bellon·Miro Haller·Andrey Labunets·Enze Liu·Stefan Savage
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Abstract

Government investigatory and surveillance powers are important tools for examining crime and protecting public safety. However, since these tools must be employed in secret, it can be challenging to identify abuses or changes in use that could be of significant public interest. In this paper, we evaluate this phenomenon in the context of National Security Letters (NSLs). NSLs are a form of legal process that empowers parts of the United States federal government to request certain pieces of information for national security purposes. After initial concerns about the lack of public oversight, Congress worked to increase transparency by mandating government agencies to publish aggregated statistics on the NSL usage and by allowing the private sector to report information on NSLs in transparency reports. The implicit goal is that these transparency mechanisms should deter large-scale abuse by making it visible. We evaluate how well these mechanisms work by carefully analyzing the full range of publicly available data related to NSL use. Our findings suggest that they may not lead to the desired public scrutiny as we find published information requires significant manual effort to collect and parse data due to the lack of structure and context. Moreover, we discovered mistakes (subsequently fixed after our reporting to the ODNI), which suggests a lack of active auditing. Taken together, our case study of NSLs provides insights and suggestions for the successful construction of transparency mechanisms that enable effective public auditing.

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Alex Bellon, Miro Haller, Andrey Labunets, Enze Liu, Stefan Savage. 2025-02-01. An Empirical Analysis on the Use and Reporting of National Security Letters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02768

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