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ASNE supports letter requesting greater transparency in national security requests
- By: ASNE staff
- On: 07/19/2013 16:00:17
- In: Freedom of the press
ASNE was one of 63 organizations to send a joint letter asking for greater transparency relating to national security requests by the U.S. government to various communications providers.
The letter was sent to 16 high-ranking government officials including the president, attorney general, Senate majority and minority leaders, speaker and minority leader, chair and ranking minority members of the Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, director of national intelligence and director of the National Security Agencies.
ASNE was one of 63 organizations to send a joint letter asking for greater transparency relating to national security requests by the U.S. government to various communications providers.
The letter was sent to 16 high-ranking government officials including the president, attorney general, Senate majority and minority leaders, speaker and minority leader, chair and ranking minority members of the Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, director of national intelligence and director of the National Security Agencies.
The signatories to the letter and supporters of this effort are a bipartisan group of companies, investors, nonprofit organizations and trade associations. They range from tech companies, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, to nonprofit media organizations, such as ASNE, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the World Press Freedom Coalition, to general nonprofit organizations, such as the generally liberal American Civil Liberties Union and generally conservative Americans for Tax Reform. They have come together on this issue with two basic requests.
1. The U.S. government should ensure that companies who are entrusted with the privacy and security of their users' data are allowed to regularly report statistics that reflect the following:
- The number of government requests for information about their users made under specific legal authorities, such as Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and the various National Security Letter (NSL) statutes.
- The number of individuals, accounts or devices for which information was requested under each authority.
- The number of requests under each authority that sought communications content, basic subscriber information and other information.
2. The government should also augment the annual reporting that is already required by statute by issuing its own regular "transparency report" providing the same information: the total number of requests under specific authorities for specific types of data and the number of individuals affected by each.
The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Time have already written about the letter. We hope you will write or editorialize about this issue, as well.
ASNE's dedication to improved government transparency includes a desire to reform the laws that justify the broad collection of metadata regarding communications that are made by individuals throughout the U.S. -- the breadth of which was recently revealed by Edward Snowden.
ASNE's main concern in this area is that these laws, primarily Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the FISA law, do not allow the recipient of a request for information to discuss the request, not even the fact that it was received, and do not require the government to provide any information, even that was scrubbed of classified or sensitive materials, regarding the collection. These restrictions prevent any meaningful oversight of these programs.
A related petition was also submitted to the White House via the "We the People" website. The petition was not signed by any organizations but made the same request. It will require a White House response if it receives 100,000 supporting signatures.