Internet Archive Notes NSL Error to FBI That May Affect Thousands of Recipients, Says EFF
The Internet Archive disclosed a national security letter (NSL) that included a legal error about how the archive that's amassed a vast historical web collection over 20 years could challenge a gag order, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented…
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the nonprofit, in a Thursday news release. The FBI issues NSLs with accompanying gag orders that prohibit electronic communications providers from even revealing they received such a letter. The NSL letter sent to the archive in August said the organization had the right to make an annual challenge to the gag order, but Congress updated the law last year, permitting more than one request per year, said EFF. The archive told the FBI it didn't have information that the agency sought and also pointed out the error, which prompted the FBI to drop the gag order and allow the NSL to be disclosed, EFF said. As a result, EFF estimated the FBI will inform "potentially thousands of communications providers" that received NSLs over the past 18 months about the mistake. Archive founder Brewster Kahle said the gag orders with the error concealed that the agency was "giving all NSL recipients bad information about their rights." DOJ didn't comment. In 2007, the archive received an NSL, which it successfully challenged and disclosed. EFF has been helping organizations challenge NSLs (see 1611300069 and 1604210046). The archive houses a web collection called the "Wayback Machine" of more than 150 million web pages, 240,000 movies and 500,000 plus audio files, among other records. On Tuesday, Kahle said in a blog post the organization is creating a copy of its digital collections in Canada as a result of Donald Trump's election. "It means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions," he wrote.