Tag Archives: privacy

U.S. requests for Twitter user data up 11% in first half of 2013


By SB Anderson

Twitter kicked off what has become semi-annual transparency report season late last week, reporting an 11% increase in requests from the U.S. government for data about its users in the first half of 2013 compared to July to December of last year. Compared to the same period a year ago, requests were up 33%.

From Jan. 1 to June 30, there were 902 requests from the U.S., making up about 78% of requests from all countries.

The number of users or accounts affected by those U.S. requests was up 15%, while the number of cases in which data was ultimately released was down slightly to 67%.

Similar transaprency reports from Google and Microsoft are expected soon. Those two and Twitter have been making regular updates on user data requests, with Google doing so the longest — and with the most detail.

The reports in recent months are of greater urgency given recent controversy over government surveillance.

Earlier this summer, a number of companies that had not traditionally been making regular releases about data requests issued reports in response to revelations that the National Security Administration was amassing enormous databases of online and phone activity. (View a table with that data here).

In the U.S., the percentage of requests that came via search warrant was up slightly while the number from subpoenas — the most common — was down by the same amount.

The U.S. accounts for about 4 out of 5 requests from around the world, although that number dropped slightly in the first half of 2013 as the number of non-US requests rose by nearly one-third.

Japan had the most requests after the U.S., but that was only 8% of total requests. In almost all cases, data is actually released to foreign countries at a much lower rate than in the U.S. The percentage for Japan, for example, was 16% compared to 67% in the U.S.

The chart below shows growth in global requests.

Read more stories on the transparency reports.

ACLU says study shows ‘mass tracking’ of license plates by local law enforcement


By SB Anderson

ACLU interactive map on license plate tracking

If you click on the map above, you’ll be taken to a just-released interactive map that American Civil Liberties Union put together on the fast-growing trend of local law enforcement agencies photographing — and retaining data about — millions of license plates. The map links to responses received from local law enforcement agences to a public records requests ACLU made about the plate tracking systems.

The ACLU analyzed 26,000 pages of documents that it received with the records requests and concluded ” increasingly, all of this [license plate] data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.”

“The implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other
civil liberties threats,” the ACLU said in a 37-page report. “More and more cameras, longer retention periods, and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.:

ON THE JUMP PAGE: Read the full report.

Continue reading →

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

When it comes to PRISM, whither Twitter? #mumstheword


By SB Anderson
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo visits with ASNE in Washington

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo visits with ASNE in Washington (Photo from C-SPAN video).

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo joined us for lunch on Wednesday at the American Society of News Editors conference in Washington and talked about journalism and its intersection with Twitter (and vice-versa); his company and its culture; privacy; and a few other topics.

But when it came to one hot topic in DC of late and  why Twitter wasn’t included on the now-famous PowerPoint slide about companies the NSA has relationships with for the top-secret PRISM user data collection program, Costolo pretty much had precisely 140 characters of nothing specific to say. With a hashtag of #mumstheword.

Asked  by Marty Baron of the Washington Post whether Twitter was “invited or instructed by the federal government to participate in this program, whether you chose to turn the government down, and if you did that based on legal objections, what were those legal objections,” Costolo wouldn’t take the bait.

He did, however, say Twitter is very aggressive and takes a “principled approach” when it comes to pushing back against government requests for large amounts of user data.

“When we get specific, pointed legal requests that are legally valid. . . we respond to them,” he said in reply to Baron’s question. “When we receive general requests that we feel are overly broad, not valid legal requests, we push back on those. I think it’s fair to say as has been reported in other cases like Wikileaks, we will spend time and energy and money to defend out users’ rights to be informed about the information that is being requested about them. . . That’s really all i can say about it.”

Earlier in his visit, interviewer Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post said, “It feels like we’re sort of dancing around this thing that’s all in caps called PRISM. You can’t talk so much about it.  . . .  Does it bother you you can’t talk more about your relationship with the government and these sorts of requests?”

His repsonse was much the same as what he told Baron.

He did note that he has talked publicly about a rule in the UK that makes it illegal to even disclose there’s an injunction in some situations, and called such rules “Kafkaesque. . . . Those kinds of things are generally disturbing and we have called for and would love to see more transparency around these types of requests.”

I’ve extracted the PRISM-related discussion from the hourlong Costolo chat (but the content isn’t available yet for embedding). View it here: