FBI going to court more often to get personal Internet-usage data

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is increasingly going to court to get personal e-mail and Internet usage information as service providers balk at disclosing customer data without a judge’s orders.

Investigators once routinely used administrative subpoenas, called national security letters, seeking information about who sent and received e-mail and what Web sites individuals visited. The letters can be issued by FBI field offices on their own authority, and they obligate the recipients to keep the requests secret. But more recently, many service providers receiving national security letters have limited the information they give to customers’ names, addresses, length of service and phone billing records. Investigators seeking more expansive information over the past two years have turned to court orders called business record requests. In the first three months of this year, more than 80 percent of all business record requests were for Internet records that would previously have been obtained through national security letters, the FBI said. The FBI made more than four times as many business records requests in 2010 than in 2009: 96 compared with 21, according to Justice Department reports.