Tag Archives: NSA

Microsoft got 44 requests for data a day from US agencies in first half of 2013


By SB Anderson

U.S. government agencies asked Microsoft to share customer information or content nearly 8,000 times in the first half of 2013. Those requests involved 22,300 accounts, new data released by the Seattle-based firm on Friday said.

Based on so-called “transparency” reports released so far this year from Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, US agencies between January and the end of June made, on average, up to 183 requests per day across the four companies, for a total of 33,338 requests affecting 84,597 accounts.

Google, which has been releasing law enforcement request data longer than any major competitor, has yet to release its data for the first half of the year. Microsoft first released some data early last summer after former NSA employee Edward Snowden began leaking top-secret documents about government surveillance programs involving the major internet companies.

Turkey, Germany, the United Kingdom and France followed the U.S. in the No. 1 spot for requests from Microsoft. Together, the five made up 3 in 4 of the global 37,196 requests affecting 66,539 accounts.

Just over 1 in 10 U.S. requests led to user content being released. In 2 out of 3 cases, at least some user account information such as name, gender and Zip Code was turned over. Only about 1 in 100 was rejected for not meeting legal requirements. And in just under 1 in 20 cases — 17% — no customer data was found.

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U.S. government asked to snoop on 40,000 Yahoo accounts in first half of year


By SB Anderson

Yahoo on Friday reported that U.S. authorities asked for user data 12,444 times in the first six months of this year — covering 40,322 accounts. That is 69 requests a day, on average.

Most of those cases resulted in the government getting at least some data, including e-mails, photos and uploaded files.

Friday’s was Yahoo’s first-ever transparency report and it says it will continue every six months. Twitter and Microsoft released their reports earlier this summer; Google, which has been releasing reports longer than the other major players, has yet to for the first half of 2013. (Related: The Washington Post reported this morning that Google has stepped-up its efforts to encrypt that data that moves between its servers in an attempt to thwart spying).

“Democracy demands accountability, and accountability requires transparency,” Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a blog post on Friday. “We hope our report encourages governments around the world to more openly share information about the requests they make for users’ information.”

Yahoo Data ReleaseYahoo reported that in about 8% of cases, either no data was found or Yahoo rejected the request. So in just over 9 in 10 cases, at least some data was turned over.

About half the time — 55% — that was “non-content data,” which Yahoo describes as “basic subscriber information including the information captured at the time of registration such as an alternate e-mail address, name, location, and IP address, login details, billing information, and other transactional information (e.g., “to,” “from,” and “date” fields from email headers).”

In nearly 2 in 5 cases, other content was turned over. Yahoo’s description: “Data that our users create, communicate, and store on or through our services. This could include words in a communication (e.g., Mail or Messenger), photos on Flickr, files uploaded, Yahoo Address Book entries, Yahoo Calendar event details, thoughts recorded in Yahoo Notepad or comments or posts on Yahoo Answers or any other Yahoo property.”

Yahoo reported about the same number of government requests as Facebook, but affecting substantially more user accounts — 40,300 vs. up to 21,000. Twitter reported 902 requests affecting 1,319 accounts for the first half of the year.

Germany, Italy, Taiwan and France filled out the Top 5 in number of requests after the U.S. Outside the U.S., requests totaled 17,026, involving 22,453 accounts.

The government requests usually involve criminal investigations and came come by way of warrant or subpoena. Yahoo says it only complies “in response to valid, compulsory legal process from a government agency with proper jurisdiction and authority.”

National security authorities also make the requests. All companies are restricted about how much they can say — even specific numbers — about requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yahoo and others have been pressing the government to allow them more freedom to divulge those details.

Sorted Yahoo Transparency Report First Half 2013

→ Earlier stories on transparency report data.

“A huge CIA contractor is now Dana Priest’s boss. Think about that.”

— Quote from a Gawker story that reminded us of this recent QZ.com story: Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post’s new owner, is a “spymaster” with a recent a $600 million deal to build the CIA a “private cloud.”

Fissures in support for the Surveillance State


By SB Anderson

Last week all but certainly will be looked back at as a watershed week in shifting support for the Surveillance State by not only U.S. citizens, but members of Congress.

For those who’ve been in eyes-half-open mode because it’s Summer and want to catch up, The New York Times today has a must-read on the politics and cross-party partnerships behind last week’s surprising oh-so-close vote in the House that would have killed funding for the National Security Administration’s telephone data collection, exposed by Edward Snowden.

Two quotes that stand out:

“There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here.”

“The time has come to stop it, and the way we stop it is to approve this amendment.”

The first, from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who is helping craft a bill “to significantly rein in N.S.A. telephone surveillance,” the NYT story says.

The second is from someone who was a force behind the Patriot Act and who is helping Lofgren on that bill. — U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. His very brief (and unexpected) remarks — seven sentences — before the House vote last week were seen as pivotal.

Govt Anti-Terror PoliciesMeantime, new research data shows the opinion shift among Americans. Almost half of those polled from July 17-21 said their “greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported on Friday.

That was a 15-point jump since 2010, when the question was last asked. “This is the first time a plurality has expressed greater concern about civil liberties than security since the question was first asked in 2004.”

Nearly 3 in 5 of those adults surveyed — 56% — said courts aren’t providing the safety net needed for government data collection. “An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism,” Pew said.

Politically, a clear lean toward more support for civil liberties vs. national security since 2010 is pretty much across the board, as the chart below shows. Particularly noteworthy is the shift in the civil liberties v. national security view by Tea Party Republicans.

For the media, the public remains divided over how aggressive journalists should be in reporting on secret methods used to fight terrorism — 47% yes, 47% no. That’s the same as 2006. However, there has been a partisan shift, as Republicans now are much more supportive of an aggressive media role (+17 points), while Democrats have retreated (-14 points). See chart below.

In a column today, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, whose release of Snowden’s inside information along with the Washington Post detonated the current NSA and civil liberties controversy, took note of the shift in the Venn diagram of civil liberties and national security that Pew’s survey revealed.

As I’ve repeatedly said, the only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That’s enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes – as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House – but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.

(Note: If you’re interested, Pew has details on how it conducted its survey).

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night keeps the NSA from its appointed rounds of massive surveillance


By SB Anderson

A fascinating read in the New York Times today details the century-old “mail covers” program and the new “Mail Isolation Control and Tracking” initiative that essentially gather metadata about your snail mail with the same intentions of NSA programs such as PRISM that do that with your electronic communication.

Under the programs, “Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

“Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.”

Under mail covers, When asked by law enforcement, postal officials track a persons mail for a period of time. The post office rarely turns down a request, the Times says, and includes “tens of thousands” of items a year.

Mail Isolation Control and Tracking was born of the anthrax scare a few years ago. It photocopies the outside of mail — 160 billion pieces last year alone, the Times said.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

→ Full NYT story