Google Discloses Contents of Eight National Security Letters

Google on Tuesday disclosed the contents of eight National Security Letters it received between 2010 and 2015, becoming the latest company under reforms afforded by the USA Freedom Act to do so. The requests made by United States Federal Bureau of Investigation were made to Google to identify 21...

Yahoo Discloses Contents of Three National Security Letters

Yahoo today disclosed the contents of three National Security Letters it has received since 2013, the first time a company has made such a disclosure since the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act. Under the law, the FBI is now required to periodically review whether non-disclosure around National...

Reddit Removes NSL Warrant Canary from Transparency Report

Reddit’s latest transparency report is missing a nugget of information that was present in a previous report. Last year’s report included a warrant canary which stated that as of Jan. 29, 2015, Reddit had never received a National Security Letter, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order or...

Latest Microsoft Transparency Report Details Content Removal Requests

Microsoft launched a new transparency website this week that bundles reports detailing requests for data the company has received, including those from law enforcement, the government, and elsewhere. The page, which Microsoft is calling its Transparency Hub, is somewhat similar to what Apple did...

Yahoo Transparency Report Shows Requests for Data Up

Yahoo this week published its transparency report for the first six months of the year and the numbers indicate that government requests for data on its users are up slightly after sharp dropoff for the report covering the last six months of 2014. Yahoo said that it received 5,221 government data...

Appeals Court Vacates Lower Court's Decision on National Security Letters

A federal appeals court has sent back to a lower court an appeal in a lawsuit about the way companies are allowed to publicize information about National Security Letters they receive. The appeal consolidates three separate actions against the Attorney General that question whether the government...

Twitter Adds Email Privacy Data to Transparency Report

The number of information requests Twitter is receiving from the United States government is increasing steadily, having risen roughly 50 percent in the first six months of this year compared to the last six months of 2014. In its latest transparency report, Twitter said that it received 2,436...

CloudFlare Transparency Report Shows Spike in Court Orders

In its latest transparency report, CloudFlare says that the number of subpoenas it has received has remained steady since last year, but the volume of court orders has more than doubled since the second half of last year. While much of the data from CloudFlare’s report for the first half of 2015...

Amazon Transparency Report Shows Few Requests For User Data

Amazon has released its first transparency report, and for a company as large as Amazon, there is surprisingly little in the way of detail or explanation in the report. The company reported that it received 813 subpoenas, 25 search warrants, and 0-249 national security requests. Of the 813...

Snapchat Publishes First Transparency Report

Snapchat has released its first transparency report, covering a four-month period from November through February, and the data shows that the company didn’t receive any National Security Letters and got fewer than 400 total requests for data from the United States government. Snapchat, a Californ...

U.S. Government Requests for Yahoo User Data Drop

Yahoo received nearly 5,000 requests for user data from the United States government in the last six months of 2014 and disclosed some content in nearly 25 percent of those cases. The company said in its new transparency report that it received between 0-999 National Security Letters from the U.S...

Confusion Reigns Over FBI's Plans for National Security Letter Gag Orders

The way that National Security Letters are approved and used is one of the government’s more opaque processes. Now, you can add some more confusion into the mix, courtesy of some new comments from the FBI about when recipients are able to disclose the fact that they have received an NSL. More tha...

Canary Watch Site Launches to Track Warrant Canaries

In the years since Edward Snowden began putting much of the NSA‘s business in the street, including its reliance on the secret FISA court and National security Letters, warrant canaries have emerged as a key method for ISPs, telecoms and other technology providers to let the public know whether...

Government Demands for Verizon Customer Data Drop

The number of subpoenas, total orders and warrants that the United States government delivered to Verizon all dropped in the second half of 2014, according to the company’s latest transparency report. The giant telecom provider released data on Thursday that showed a decrease in subpoenas of abou...

National Security Letters Challenged in Ninth Circuit Court

In the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco Wednesday morning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s EFF Kurt Opsahl urged the federal appeals court to uphold a lower court’s ruling that national security letters NSLs are unconstitutional. Regardless whether the ruling is upheld, the matter of NSL...

Twitter Files Suit Over Government Restrictions on National Security Letter Data

Twitter has filed a lawsuit in federal court asking that the United States Department of Justice’s prohibitions on publishing the number and kind of government requests for data the company receives be declared unconstitutional. The suit claims that the rules infringe on Twitter’s right to free...

September 2014 Yahoo Transparency Report

There was less clamor from governments and law enforcement around the world for data collected and stored by Yahoo, but nonetheless, the technology giant still fielded more than 18,000 data requests over the first six months of the year. Yahoo yesterday released its third Transparency Report, and...

Apple CEO Tim Cook Says Company Dedicated to Protecting Users' Privacy

While much of the tech community is still swooning over the iPhone 6, Apple Pay and Apple Watch, the company’s top executive is spending a lot of time and energy trying to reassure customers that Apple is doing everything it can to protect their privacy and the security of their data. Apple CEO T...

Twitter 'Weighing Legal Options' On Publishing National Security Requests Data

Twitter officials are pushing the United States government for more freedom to publish specific numbers about national security information requests, and said the company is considering its legal options if the government doesn’t allow more data to be made public. In its latest transparency repor...

New Verizon Transparency Report Shows Large Government Appetite for Location, Content Data

Verizon said in a new transparency report that though the number of some kinds of orders dropped–including wiretap orders and warrants–others rose, including general orders and pen register and trap and trace orders, and the company received nearly 150,000 total orders in the first half of 2014...