The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved every electronic surveillance request it received in 2015, according to figures the intelligence community published on Monday.
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The court, which handles requests from the National Security Agency and FBI to engage in surveillance, approved all 1,457 requests that it received from those agencies in 2015. That represented a roughly 5 percent increase over the 1,379 requests approved in 2014. The court “modified” 80 applications, slightly changing their terms to comply with the law, up from 19 in 2014.
The FBI additionally submitted 48,642 requests for national security letters seeking information on 3,746 U.S. citizens or legal immigrants and 2,053 foreigners. The documents compel telecommunications providers to hand over subscriber data that can include location, email addresses or Internet browsing history.
The letters have become increasingly controversial over the past several years due particularly to the volume being issued and a simultaneous gag order they impose preventing companies from telling customers they’re being spied on. Microsoft in April announced that it was filing suit against the government challenging the gag order component, saying the numbers appeared to indicate the “issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine.”
Thanks to a previous suit brought by a group that included Microsoft and Google, companies won the right to share the number of orders they received within a range in 2014.
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The latest figures indicate that the court processed another 7,361 national security letter requests exclusively for subscriber information, which would include addresses and billing records, as well as 142 requests for business records.
The court was created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Its power broadened after the Patriot Act of 2002, though details of that expansion remained generally clandestine until ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked the information in 2013.
