Facebook recently triggered a spate of requests for copies of its users’ government IDs, according to a report from The Drum. But this time around, the request may not go down as smoothly in light of the news of the National Security Agency's monitoring and collecting data from Facebook and several other technology companies and services.

Facebook’s last surge in government ID requests came in January, when both it and Instagram locked some users out and said the users needed to provide a copy of a government ID before they could log back in. Facebook’s terms of service require that users have profiles with their real names and birthdays, and the company claims that it must verify this information for users who appear to be in violation of the terms of service.

When you can’t complain on Facebook, you complain on Twitter, and complain the Facebook users did. Most were angry and uncomfortable, which is to be expected, and some didn’t believe Facebook would actually request such a thing.

Facebook asks users to obscure personally identifying information from ID cards other than their photo, name, and birthday before sending the copy. Facebook claims that it permanently deletes the document from its servers “after [it resolves] your issue,” though Ars has found in the past that Facebook is less than rigorous about deleting files you ask it to delete. Facebook gave Ars the following statement: "Earlier this evening, we showed an account verification message to a very small portion of our users unnecessarily. We promptly removed the messages when we discovered the error. We're sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused."

Like most companies named in the NSA scandal, Facebook denies complicity in the NSA’s data collection operations. But reports indicate that the NSA is quite aggressive and doesn't always (or even usually) wait for an invitation from online services to get at the information they store on users. Reports from the New York Times indicate that the NSA works to break commonly used security and encryption technologies like virtual private networks (VPNs) and the secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols.