A national security letter is an administrative subpoena issued by the United States federal government to gather information for national security purposes. NSLs do not require prior approval from a judge. The Stored Communications Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, and Right to Financial Privacy Act authorize the United States federal government to seek such information that is “relevant” to authorized national security investigations. By law, NSLs can request only non-content information, for example, transactional records and phone numbers dialed, but never the content of telephone calls or e-mails.

wikipedia, of course.

Adds the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Recipients of NSLs are subject to a gag order that forbids them from ever revealing the letters’ existence to their coworkers to their friends or even to their family members much less the public.

The FBI’s systemic abuse of this power has been documented both by a Department Of Justice investigation and in documents obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The short form is: “Gimme your records and shut up about it”.

The incident with the FBI was a long time ago, I’d say ten years, back at the height of paranoia about the Internet and terrorists. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember who was reported to some FBI office that monitored Internet “threats”, and I can’t say for sure that it isn’t one of you stubborn few here at the end of time.

I couldn’t tell you precisely what Google and the rest of them hoover up, but I think what’s important is their attitude that they should record everything they can just in case it might prove useful some day. That’s the mentality of secret police everywhere, constantly compiling evidence against citizens in case it proves useful to keep them in line. That’s why my attitude is principled resistance to any such incursions into my privacy or anybody whose privacy is in my hands, like visitors to the Zone.

And what sort of information do entities like Google collect on us, other than the usual consumer info corporations hoover up so they don’t have to compete fairly in a genuine free market?

I am concerned about finding myself in trouble with the authorities, not because I’m a particularly seditious or traitorious individual, but because snoops have a tendency to see conspiracies where none actually exist, and because I suspect many of these “security” decisions are made by software, not by human analysts.

Ask me again after the November elections.

It’s true that there are terabytes of archived posts and comments from all over the Net. But most of it is people standing on their isolated soap boxes yelling into the aether, or writing virtual graffiti on walls. The Zone provides a rare example of conversation on the Internet.

I expect that some day, conversation on the Internet will be a historical curiosity.

That’s the same reason I don’t use third-party “analytics” like Google’s system, which require wiring up the site like it’s some kind of NSA listening post…and the data all goes to Google, which would then kindly share some of it with me.

I admit I get curious too, though it’s less a burning issue these days with visible traffic so low. If you guessed that lurker traffic was an order of magnitude larger than participation, we’d still have statistically-insignificant traffic.

Are we influential, and does the government monitor us? We used to get spidered by the major search engines every few hours when traffic was high, and occasionally a Zone post would rise to the top of Google’s results for a while. But they’ve scaled back spidering as our traffic has scaled back.

As for the government, well of course we’re monitored just like everybody else. Posts are open to reading without logging in (not that that would stop the NSA, of course), and you can safely assume they’re scanned for keywords. Given the content of a lot of our posts, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Zone frequently gets flagged for a look by a human.

I know of one instance when the Zone came to the attention of the FBI, and I exchanged email with an agent, explaining that the person of interest was a hothead, and they really didn’t need to disappear him to Gitmo. You’re welcome, anonymous hothead Zoner.

A lot of people in my position use a social protocol to get around the clause in the “Patriot” Act that would forbid me from disclosing when I’ve received one of those noxious “national security letters” with the built-in gag order: Ask me from time to time if I’ve received one. I can never answer yes, only “no” or “no comment”.

I have not yet received a “national security letter” and to my knowledge the Zone is not on anybody’s radar.

Ask me again sometime.

6494 posts have been made, that’s 2 a day.

31,954 comments have been made on those posts, or 10 a day.

We still have issues with posting without registering on the Space Board. And I’ll have to double check how buggy the registration process is these days; we might have made some tweaks during a Spam Storm. I’ll put on the coveralls and have a look, soon.