Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenbacher. On today's show, when the FBI spies on journalists, this summer, The Intercept, a publication that focuses on surveillance issues, obtained classified rules, revealing the largely unrestrained

procedure by which the FBI obtains journalists call information and other electronic communications

that are critical to reporting, using something called national security letters.

Joining me to discuss this is the author of the story, Cora Currier,

a reporter for The Intercept, and her focus is on national security and human rights.

Cora, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks so much for having me on.

So just a high level, what did you find in these letters? What was the most striking thing to you?

Well, what we obtained were the rules for the FBI to issue what's known as a national security letter. So these are warrantless demands that the FBI issues to companies, telecom companies for the most part, but they can also send them to banks and get certain financial information through them.

But mostly there's going to telecom companies to get metadata of people's calls.

So the, you know, who's called who and when, toll records of what you, basically what you'd see on

your phone bill. And what was unknown was whether there were, we knew that there were

specific, we knew that there were specific procedures for when the FBI wanted to target a journalist,

that there was like a some a some separate set of rules governing

journalists' records as opposed to anybody else's.

But we didn't know what they were because they had been issued the FBI guidebook, which

laid them out, had been last released in 2011 in a really heavily redacted form and the entire section on the media

rules were blacked out. So this was not a case of the FBI announcing how it targets journalists.

This was information that was obtained, you know, theoretically through a whistleblower or through a

leak, right? I mean, the reason

we know about this is because of your story. This wasn't some memo where they basically

were telling us how they do stuff. No, it wasn't something the FBI made public. They've,

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