Last year more police departments tried to erase online evidence of alleged police brutality.

Google has been asked by a US law enforcement agency to remove several videos exposing police brutality from the video sharing service YouTube, the company has revealed in its latest update to an online transparency report.

The search and software giant also received 92 requests to remove data from its services, including YouTube. The requests collectively asked for 757 individual pieces of content be removed. Google says it complied fully or partially with 63 percent of the requests. The company noted it received a request from law enforcement to take down a video showing police brutality and another for videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. Google did not comply with either.

The IT giant says the overall number of requests for content removal it receives from governmental agencies has risen, and so has the number of requests to disclose the private data of Google users.

Google is alone in providing this data to the public, which it says it hopes will give a push to efforts to reform a 25-year-old government privacy law that lets law enforcement get access to users’ online communications without having to get a judge’s approval.
The transparency tool also covers requests from other governments around the world, but due to the size of the U.S. population, Google’s California headquarters and the large number of Americans online, the U.S. leads the world in data requests to the search giant.
http://rt.com/news/google-report-police-brutality-767/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/google-data-requests/