Not to jump on you in particular -- there are many posts in this thread alone conflating things -- but I've noticed that there exists a great confusion about Na

Not to jump on you in particular -- there are many posts in this thread alone conflating things -- but I've noticed that there exists a great confusion about National Security Letters here on HN, even amongst those who seem to think they're following these things very closely. A NSL is not a catch-all. It can only compel disclosure of metadata, aka non-content data, aka pretty much what's covered under Smith v Maryland (third party doctrine and all that). That alone is damaging, of course: when the police were getting phone number records in 1976, technology was very different from say, the ability to track your every movement just from the IDs of the cell phone towers that your phone connects to as you move around your city. However, a NSL cannot compel someone to write a backdoor into a program, or force you to hand over your private encryption keys, or even hand over the content of a single email. There are many other legal approaches to these other things (like a real court order from a judge), and there is a decent chance that a company is completely spineless and rolls over for the government without any need for the request to be legal (a la AT&T and room 641A), but those approaches have nothing to do with National Security Letters. I wish people would learn a little bit about this before thinking they know a lot about this...