14 DAY TRIAL // Another tech giant has decided to come forth with some details about the information they have been required to deliver to the authorities in the past few months.
Apple, who has denied even having heard of the NSA PRISM program before the documents were leaked two weeks ago, is now revealing how many requests they’ve received from the authorities and how they’ve treated them.
In the past six month, Apple has received up to 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcements. These included criminal investigations and national security issues, but most regarded robberies, missing children or efforts to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease.
Microsoft has also released similar information this past weekend and they said to have received between 6,000 and 7,000 warrants that affected between 31,000 and 32,000 customers during the last six months of 2012.
In a similar statement, Facebook has also revealed that it has received some 9,000 to 10,000 requests that affected up to 19,000 users in the same period of time.
Google has criticized both Facebook and Microsoft’s data disclosures, saying that the users need to be able to differentiate between different types of government requests.
The company itself publishes criminal requests separately from National Security Letters and so it thinks that lumping the two categories together is a step back for users.
A bit later, Twitter’s legal director wrote that it is important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.
This should make it easier for users to see exactly how many requests these companies receive regarding robberies and other similar charges and how many of them regard national security.
In light of the leak of NSA documents about the PRISM program, the authorities have claimed to have stopped many terrorist attacks in an effort to justify the surveillance project.