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"Speak No Evil: National Security Letters, Gag Orders, and the First Amendment"

Rachel Dallal

Berkeley Technology Law Journal2019https://doi.org/10.15779/z388911r16article
ABDC A
Weight
0.34

Abstract

Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a small start-up.Your company provides multiple online services to its subscribers: a blogging interface, an email platform, and a file-sharing site.As an activist and a digital entrepreneur, you nurture a powerful belief in the democratizing potential of the Internet, and you dedicate much of your free time to campaigning for such causes as net neutrality and consumer data protection.One day, unexpectedly, you receive a letter from the FBI.Under the auspices of the USA Freedom Act, the letter requires you to disclose certain information about one of your subscribers immediately. 1 There is no search warrant.No court has seen or approved the contents of this letter.It is, however, a legal demand.And it comes with an additional mandate: a nondisclosure order, prohibiting you from notifying the FBI's target and from ever revealing-to anyone-that the government has contacted you for information at all.The receipt of this letter marks your induction into the controversial world of national security letters, and until a federal court contradicts the FBI's insistence on your silence, you may not reveal the details of your situation to anyone but a lawyer.This scenario plays out on a regular basis.An increasingly ubiquitous weapon in the FBI's investigative arsenal, the national security letter (NSL) is unique among the federal government's myriad search powers.Most akin to administrative subpoenas, NSLs permit the FBI to efficiently compel the release of individual consumer data from third-party institutions, such as banks, telephone companies, and Internet service providers (ISPs). 2 They are, quite literally, letters: sent directly from the FBI to the recipient, demanding access to information that the FBI certifies is relevant to an ongoing national

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/z388911r16

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@article{rachel2019,
  title        = {{"Speak No Evil: National Security Letters, Gag Orders, and the First Amendment"}},
  author       = {Rachel Dallal},
  journal      = {Berkeley Technology Law Journal},
  year         = {2019},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15779/z388911r16},
}

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"Speak No Evil: National Security Letters, Gag Orders, and the First Amendment"

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Evidence weight

0.34

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00
M · momentum0.80 × 0.15 = 0.12
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.