The U.S. govt. is requesting more private data from Google.
Law enforcement is asking Google for its users' data more than ever -- and most of the time, they aren't getting a warrant first.
Governments around the world, especially the U.S. government, are continuing to request more private data from Google. The search giant released a fresh transparency report this morning, the United States accounted for almost 40% the total requests (8,438) and the number of users (14,791). Thetotal numbers in the US for 2012 amounted to a 33% increase from 2011. And while Google only complied with two-thirds of the total requests globally, they complied with 88% of the requests in the United States.
“68 percent of the requests Google received from government entities in the U.S. were through subpoenas,” explains the blog post. “These are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), and are the easiest to get because they typically don’t involve judges.” The FBI and police use a subpoena, as opposed to a warrant, to snoop on Google users' information.
A Google spokesman says that requests from the U.S. government are up 6 percent from the first half of 2012. Google’s compliance with requests is down slightly, from 90 percent to 88 percent.
It’s probable that the actual number of requests from Google is vastly higher, as the number likely does not include any intelligence surveillance requests. National Security Letters, the controversial tool used by the FBI to gain access to personal information without any court authorization whatsoever (and currently being challenged in a federal district court by EFF), are almost certainly not included. Normally, NSLs come with gag orders attached to them so the organizations that receive them cannot even admit they exist. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs in the past decade.
It's likely Patriot Act orders under the secretive Section 215 (EFF is currently suing the goverment over this section under the Freedom of Information Act), and classified FISA court orders, which may allow for untargeted warrantless wiretapping, aren't included either.
Despite this evidence of the increasing amount of digital data obtained by law enforcement, the government wants even more power. The FBI claims that digital communications are “going dark,” and reports indicate the Obama administration with soon ask Congress for a new Internet surveillance law in the form of an expansion of CALEA, which forces telephone companies to install backdoors into their digital systems. If the FBI has their way, the new law could force Internet companies to do the same, setting up not only a privacy nightmare for users, but inhibit Internet security and innovation as well. It will be a major battle in the coming months and EFF plans fight it.
Unfortunately, government surveillance of the Internet is not only a problem in the United States. Google’s transparency report paints a bleak picture of increasing amount of electronic surveillance across the world. Global electronic surveillance has increased 70% since Google started reporting its numbers, and the region-by-region breakdown is even starker:
The number of inquiries from Europe has increased by almost 100%.
The number of inquiries from Asia-Pacific region has increased by more than 200% since we launched.
The number of inquiries from North America has increased by more than 100% since we launched.
The only good news is from Latin America where the numbers have actually decreased by 60% since 2009. However, the trend is clear: governments now, more than ever, issuing surveillance demands to Internet companies. And it's important our privacy laws are updated to protect users' rights.
After the FBI surveillance of General David Petraeus’s correspondence with his mistress over Gmail sparked a full-blown scandal, the public got a lot more interested in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which sets rules for government spying. This new transparency report now details the different legal methods under ECPA by which governments try to extract data from tech companies.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/governments-requesting-more-private-data-from-google/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/google-releases-transparency-report-showing-us-surveillance-requests-33-last-year