National Security Letters

One of the outcomes of the Wikileaks episode is that I learned about something called National Security Letters, of which approximately 50,000 are issued every year, many of which don't need a court order if either terrorism or espionage represent the cause of the request. These demand of ISPs or any sort of cloud service to turn over information, records, data, etc. without any notification to the party being investigated. In fact, until Twitter challenged this in court recently, it was required NOT to reveal the request to those whose data was being turned over. As more and more of our data gets hosted outside our home (I, for one, use an online data backup service which means all my electronic communication is readily available to prying eyes), the potential for yet another Orwellian chapter to be added to the book of our diminishing freedom has been nicely crafted.