This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 13, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Google is now telling the public more than it ever has before

about national security letters it receives from the federal government.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, argues that this new level of transparency

could provide a model for smaller companies trying to comply with these secretive government requests.

The American public knows very little about how the FBI has used national security letters

apart from the very limited information the government

itself releases each year, just basically a general count of the number of letters issued

for everything except basic subscriber information and how many Americans

were affected by those requests.

Google has done something basically unprecedented by releasing broad ranges of data about the number

of requests they get each year and the number of user accounts that are affected by

those requests. Google a little while back basically did a very unusual thing by

starting to release information in their transparency report about how many

government requests for information about users they get in criminal investigations.

National security letters though typically come with gag orders

which means that the recipient can't even reveal the existence of the order and

so so far they had had to exclude those requests as well as other kinds of wiretap requests in

intelligence investigations from that annual tally. So now we have

started to get a little bit of information. We know that every year they've

gotten fewer than a thousand total national security letters, but each year it

...