Dropbox has filed an Amicus Brief with the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requesting permission to publish the number of National Security Letter (NSL) requests the cloud storage company receives, and the number of users affected by those requests.
Following the lead of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook - and more recently LinkedIn - Dropbox says it did so, because the government has told Dropbox that it isn't allowed to publish exactly how many national-security requests, if any, it receives.
"Instead, the government will permit Dropbox to provide information about national-security requests only if those requests are lumped together with regular law-enforcement requests and, even then, only in bands of 1 000," the brief stated.
It added that, as Dropbox received fewer than 100 regular law-enforcement requests in 2012, reporting the way the government has requested would harm Dropbox's efforts at transparency.
The issue here, according to Threatpost, is the problems it could cause not so much for the large entities such as Google and Dropbox, but for the smaller ISPs. Should a small ISP, with less than 100 customers, report it received 50 NSL requests, this information would tip off terrorists or criminals that the ISP is being targeted by the government.
Trustworthy relationships
The companies argue that the government's denial violates their First Amendment rights to free speech, and affects their ability to maintain a trustworthy relationship with users with regard to government access to their data.
Dropbox has been filing transparency reports for a couple of years, and says it is "committed to sharing the number of requests for user information that it receives from law enforcement and how it handles them".
"We scrutinise all data requests to make sure they comply with the law and are committed to giving notice to users when their accounts are identified in a law enforcement request."
The brief claimed there is no statute, nor any other law, supporting the government's demands, and that, in fact, the proposed gag order violates the First Amendment, as it not only interferes with the public's "right to obtain truthful information about a matter of substantial public debate", it also impinges on service providers' rights to publish said information.
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