Analysis by Marcy Wheeler here: <a href="http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/01/27/the-new-transparency-guidelines/" rel="nofollow">http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/01/27/the-new-transparency-gu...</a><p>Quoting the nub of it (please note, this is all her, not me):<p>First, you can sort of see what the government really wants to hide with these schemes. They don’t want you to know if they submit a single NSL or 215 order affecting 1000 customers, which it’s possible might appear without the bands.They don’t want you to see if there’s a provider getting almost no requests (which would be hidden by the initial bands).<p>And obviously, they don’t want you to know when they bring new capabilities online, in the way they didn’t want users to know they had broken Skype. Though at this point, what kind of half-ased terrorist wouldn’t just assume the NSA has everything?<p>I think the biggest shell game might arise from the distinction between account (say, my entire Google identity) and selector (my various GMail email addresses, Blogger ID, etc). By permitting reporting on selectors, not users, this could obscure whether a report affects 30 identities of one customer or the accounts of 30 customers. Further, there’s a lot we still don’t know about what FISC might consider a selector (they have, in the past, considered entire telecom switches to be).