Although over 45 countries sent Twitter requests, it's the US that's most active

Feb 6, 2014 15:59 GMT  ·  By

After making sure to slam the US government for the limitations set to companies’ Transparency reports on FISA requests, Twitter has also revealed that it has a brand new transparency report.

According to the company, over the past 24 months, there has been an increase of 66 percent in requests for account information coming from over 45 countries, concerning over 6,400 accounts.

Most of these requests have been issued by the United States government, namely 59 percent.

For the period between July 1 and December 31, 2013, Twitter received a total of 1,410 account information requests and provided a response to half of these. The requests impacted 2,121 accounts.

While Twitter may have received a lot of data requests, most of them came from the United States (833). The second closest country to seek information was Japan, who sent 213 requests affecting 253 accounts. Saudi Arabia sent over 100 requests, while France and the UK both sent over 50 requests.

Given the rather small number of requests, when compared to companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, Twitter didn’t reveal any type of FISA requests data. The information would have been useless anyway, given how the government is forcing companies to only report numbers in bands of 1,000.

The company’s Jeremy Kessel, global legal policy manager, said that the limitations set by the government violated the First Amendment and that Twitter would consider legal action on the matter.

Kessel also wrote that Twitter not only wanted to reveal specific numbers, but also to have the freedom to disclose whether a certain type of request was sent to the company or not. “Unfortunately, we are currently prohibited from providing this level of transparency,” a blog post reads.