US Intelligence Community Offers a Little Insight Into Surveillance Activities
June 27, 2014
The Obama Administration provided a small peek into its intelligence surveillance efforts, releasing a new report on how many requests it made for information in 2013.
The report offers some new details about how many court orders it obtained in 2013 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- about 1,900, along with an additional 178 requests for business records -- as well as a few details about the 19,000 or so National Security Letters (which are a form of subpoena) the government sent.
The report may not be particularly meaningful since intelligence officials still use vague definitions to describe data requests and the figures can’t be placed in context because we don’t have data from previous years.
US Intelligence Community Offers a Little Insight Into Surveillance Activities Statistical Transparency Report Regarding Use of National Security Authorities (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)