FBI Mum On ISP Identities to Keep Them Safe (from You)

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Wondering why the FBI doesn’t name phone and internet service providers that help them in surveillance programs? They’re trying to protect those companies from the wrath of the snooped-upon customers.

The explanation comes from an FBI section chief named David M. Hardy, as part of a court declaration recently made public following a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union. Hardy, the chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, Records Management Division, wrote that the FBI resists revealing the identities of ISPs assisting the agency so as to ensure future co-operation:

[T]hese businesses would be substantially harmed if their customers knew that they were furnishing information to the FBI. The stigma of working with the FBI would cause customers to cancel the companies’ services and file civil actions to prevent further disclosure of subscriber information… [G]iven that these companies would pay a high price if it were known that they were providing information about their customers to the FBI, it is likely that companies, though lacking grounds to do so, would nevertheless avail themselves of legal options to resist cooperation. It is only with the understanding of complete confidentiality that full cooperation of such sources can be enlisted, and only through this confidence that these sources can be persuaded to continue to fully cooperate in providing valuable assistance in the future.

As much as I’m on the fence about this kind of surveillance (I’m against it in theory, but that theory shakes when faced with the realities of “But it helps catch bad guys”), this does just seem like realism on behalf of the FBI; who wouldn’t want to switch providers if they knew that they were being spied upon?

More on Techland:

Teardown: Inside an FBI Tracking Device

FBI Swaps Servers, Kills Malware Bots In Cyber-Sting

Digital Privacy: If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, Do You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’?