Facebook, Microsoft disclose FISA requests, sort of

June 15, 2013

Both Facebook and Microsoft said late Friday that they had been given permission from the U.S. government to disclose how many times the two companies had been asked to turn over user information to the Feds as part of a national security order. However, the data comes with so many caveats that little information can be gleaned from it. For their part, Google and Twitter opted out of similar disclosures, precisely for those reasons. For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities, the company said in a blog post. For its part, Facebook said that it had received 9,000 requests of the same nature during the same period. Both Facebook and Microsoft have been named in reports by The Guardian and the Washington Post alleging that many of the Web's top companies have actively participated in a program, dubbed Prism, that supplied information on Web searches, emails, and other user communications whenever the government requested. AOL, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and the other companies named in the report denied the allegations, with both Facebook and Google doing so vociferously. Edward Snowden, a former employee of the National Security Agency, later outed himself as the source of the information. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2042125/facebook-microsoft-disclose-fisa-requests-sort-of.html#tk.rss_all