Privacy Digest

DOJ’s “Community of Interest” Letters are Illegal: "

Over the weekend, EFF released documents obtained through our FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project, exposing the FBI’s habit of asking AT&T, Verizon and MCI for the ‘community of interest’ surrounding a particular customer in exigent circumstances letters. Your community of interest is your friends and the people they call, or, as one Government glossary defines it, it's a 'grouping of users who generate a majority of their traffic in calls to other members of the group.'

This latest revelation piles a new illegal behavior on top of an old one we all knew about, and underscores the need to stop allowing the Executive Branch foxes to guard our privacy henhouses.

We already knew that the FBI’s use of ‘exigent circumstances’ letters was illegal. DOJ’s Inspector General Fine already condemned them in a well-publicized IG report (pp. 93-98) that outlined how hundreds of requests were made where there was no immediate danger of death or serious physical injury and, in any event, ‘the letters did not recite the factual predication necessary to invoke [the emergency] authority.’

The new revelation that EFF’s crack FOIA team unearthed is that the FBI didn’t just get your information through these improper demands: it got information on all of your friends. That’s illegal too.

Continued after the jump.

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(Read Original Article - Via EFF: Deep Links.)