The man who won the right to discuss his National Security Letter (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The man who won the right to discuss his National Security Letter (2011)

onthemedia.org

96 pointsjaynos14 comments

From January 2011, but well worth a re-listen today. This highlights one of the problems with government secrecy. National Security Letters come with a gag order that keeps the recipient from even discussing receipt of the letter with their lawyer.

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What happens if the FBI hands you a National Security Letter but you tell them "I'm not good with legal matters at all so I won't even look at this until my legal team has had a chance to go over it in detail"? Can they verbally coerce you to read and comprehend the material?

Does it even matter if you read or comprehend the material? IANAL. As far as I'm aware knowledge of the law does not preclude it from affecting you. It's not a contract they're giving you, they don't need your consent.

From my understanding they just notify you and it's up to you to make heads or tails of it.

I'm having trouble finding a source outside of an oblique reference in the Wikipedia article for NSLs, but yes, you can talk to an attorney about the letter. This was not the case originally (or at least in the opinion of the government), but the law was changed to allow consulting with a lawyer (and challenging the letter in court as well). IANAL, but I play one on the Internet.

I'm curious how these letters are delivered. If you know something is likely to be an NSL in the envelope, what happens if you just forward it along to someone else, such as a journalist, without ever opening it.

Do people have a legal obligation to accept and read US mail?

You probably get served with it, like a court summons or a lawsuit.

Nick Merrill did a Reddit AMA a couple of years ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fjfby/iama_director_of...

This is terrible blogspam. How about linking to the original article from 2010? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifte...

Terrible blogspam? They have the audio interview at the top of the post for you to listen to the actual interview.

The audio from 2 years ago though...

And the story that driverdan linked to is 2 years old as well. This may be a re-hashing of a 2 year old story by On The Media, but at least it is original content. The point isn't that the story is old, the point is that there was more to this than just a blog post and if you didn't listen to the interview, you missed out on that part.

I don't see any audio. They must be using Flash or 3rd party JS that I have blocked. The site looks like a typical cluttered blogspam blog to me[1]. They need some serious UI work.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/mnbGlEw.png

UPDATE: I take back my statement. Apparently there is supposed to be an audio interview at the top which won't show up if you block Flash and/or 3rd party scripts / ads.

Nick Merrill tried to crowdfund an ISP way back that automatically encrypts all traffic, making surveillance impossible. Of course it ended underfunded.

It didn't end, though its progress was slow/hurt by not meeting the targets. I think he's planning a (small) launch soon.

http://www.calyxinstitute.org/

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