Facebook on Monday became one of the latest companies since Justice Department reporting rules were relaxed late last month to release more details about the number and type of secret requests that U.S. authorities have made for user account information and content.

Facebook in a release said it had received up to 999 requests for content under the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the first half of 2013, and those requests covered from 5,000 to 5,999 accounts. Another 0-999 FISA requests that didn’t involve content — but sought information such as a subscriber name — were received, involving an equal number of accounts. It also received up to 999 “National Security Letters” from the FBI director for user information.

Those numbers were little changed from the second half of 2012. The number of National Security Letters was in the same range in the second half of 2013. Data for the FISA requests cannot be released until after a six-month waiting period, so there is no data for the second half of 2013 for those yet.

The new relaxed reporting standards allowed the FISA data to be made public for the first time. Companies that choose to report the FISA requests and NSL requests combined can use ranges of 0–249; if data is separate, it must be reported in larger ranges — 0-999. Facebook chose the latter.

Apple, which reported its data last week, chose the former. Apple said it had received between 0 and 249 FISA and NSL requests in the first half of 2013, involving the same range of accounts.

In its original “transparency report” on 2013 first-half requests, Facebook said it received between 11,000 and 12,000 requests from all law enforcement agencies, affecting 20,000-21,000 accounts.

The Justice Department agreed to relax the reporting rules as part of settling a lawsuit by a number of companies — including Facebook, seeking latitude to be more transparent in their reporting.

“The new information we are releasing today marks a significant step forward,” Facebook said in its release. “As we have said before, we believe that while governments have an important responsibility to keep people safe, it is possible to do so while also being transparent.”

SOURCE: Facebook.