US court kills FBI gag order slapped on ISP... 11 years later

I have no idea what you're talking about

In a redacted version of the NSL itself [PDF], you can make out several categories including: subscriber name, account number, email address, address, telephone number, "billing" and email address. As well as "any other information you consider to be an electronic communication transactional record."

This is what the FBI doesn't mind you knowing it asked for. For the rest of it, read the judge's decision.

On page 12 of this week's court decision [PDF], the juxtaposition of a defending quote and redacted information clearly suggests that the FBI also demanded details of any orders and shipping addresses. It also appears that the FBI did not demand the actual content of email messages.

The order reads:

Merrill also points to a 2002 letter from the Deputy Attorney General to Senator Patrick Leahy, which was later reprinted as an appendix to a 2003 senate Report. In that letter, the Deputy Attorney General states:

"NSLs can be served on Internet Service Providers to obtain information such as subscriber name, screen name or other on-line names, records identifying addresses of electronic mail sent to and from the account, records relating to merchandise orders/shipping information, and so on but not including message content and/or subject fields."

Though this communication is now public information published in a Senate Report, the Government nonetheless seeks to prevent Merrill from disclosing that the Attachment sought [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. Since this information has already been substantially disclosed ... the court is not persuaded that there is a substantial risk that disclosure of substantially the same information would lead future targets of investigations to change their behavior.

Similarly, the judge appears to purposefully disclose the very information the FBI is seeking to hide in later wording:

Indeed, many of the remaining redactions in the Attachment are even harder to justify than the categories discussed thus far. For example, the Government seeks to prevent Merrill from disclosing that [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] even though the Government now concedes that the phrase "telephone number" can be disclosed.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that we are talking about telephone and cell phone numbers here.

The judgment then does the same to highlight that billing and shipping addresses were two other categories, before going all out and simply providing a list of publicly available criteria "that encapsulates much of the redacted information in the Attachment here in dispute," adding, "The information this sample attachment reveals is substantially similar, in some instances identical, to the material that the FBI argues should not be disclosed in the Attachment."

So here then is what the FBI asked for, courtesy of some clever drafting by Judge Marrero:

• subscriber names, user names, screen names
• mailing addresses, residential addresses
• telephone records
• credit card numbers
• bank account numbers
• IP addresses
• cellphone numbers
• billing records

We'll leave the final word to Nicholas Merrill who has spent a quarter of his life fighting the gag order:

Proud to announce that I have won in federal court AGAIN and that my 11yr old #NSL gag order has been struck down https://t.co/0CrvNh1Cau

— Nicholas Merrill (@nickcalyx) September 14, 2015

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