A federal judge has released a list of all requests made by U.S. prosecutors in Washington, D.C., to secretly collect certain data about Americans' telephone, email and Internet activity from 2011 to 2016. The disclosure Wednesday continues an effort to bring more transparency to covert law enforcement activities.
The release of five years' worth of information, while still bare-bones on details, was made by Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, following a release in September that showed requests only for 2012.
The action came in a case brought by a journalist to unseal a much larger collection of information about court-ordered electronic surveillance in closed criminal investigations in the nation's capital.
The disclosure shows case identification numbers for the sealed requests, the dates on which cases were filed, the reviewing judges, and what type of device or account was to be tracked. Not revealed are who or what activity was under criminal investigation and whether surveillance ended or any charges resulted.
A list of sealed requests for records from communication service providers is itself usually sealed, leading several legal experts to say that even the listing of how often law enforcement applied to judges to obtain individual electronic records in domestic criminal cases could serve as a model for court disclosure nationwide.
The data released Wednesday show the number of sealed requests fluctuated from 284 in 2011 to a peak of 310 in 2013 and a low of 189 last year.
Only 15 of the 1,444 cases covered by the requests have been unsealed, even in part, years after the monitoring began.
Prosecutors have agreed in court to release additional information about the five year's worth of orders in coming months, including any substantive opinions, denials of requests, and data for three more years, dating to 2008, when electronic record-keeping began.
In September, prosecutors said on the basis of a preliminary assessment from the court that as many as 564 applications were filed in 2013. That figure included duplicates and may have included applications filed by government entities other than the U.S. attorney's office, according to a federal official familiar with the tally when asked about the lower number for 2013 released Wednesday.
The ongoing releases come in a case brought in 2013 by journalist Jason Leopold, then with Vice News and now BuzzFeed.
Jeffrey Louis Light, the attorney for Leopold, and Katie Townsend, litigation director of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which has joined the case, both said they were "very pleased" with the steady release of information, which they said will aid researchers, lawmakers and the public in tracking the scope, evolution and expansion of government conduct.
"I'm very happy to see things moving along, we're continuing to get information on a regular basis that has never been available before," Light said.
The type of orders tallied on the released list do not give law enforcement investigators permission to listen in on calls or read the contents of email or Internet exchanges. But they do allow the collection of sender and recipient information, and the time, date, duration and size of calls, emails, instant messages and social-media messages, as well as device identification numbers and some website information.
Tracing electronic exchanges through a target's phones, website accounts and information such as Twitter feeds and other apps - even without being able to hear or see what was said - can help investigators map the individual's universe and any pattern and timing of activities.
The request to unseal records on surveillance applications comes as courts increasingly take up cases testing the constitutional limits of law enforcement searches in an electronic era.
Police seeking surveillance orders under a 1986 statute - the type of orders on the lists being compiled under Howell - must tell a court only how the information they are seeking is relevant to an investigation.
To get a traditional authority to listen in on a landline phone call, law enforcement authorities have to meet the more rigorous legal standard of probable cause and prove to a judge that their search will probably yield evidence of a specific crime and that alternatives to a wiretap are unavailable.