Facebook, Microsoft disclose FISA requests, sort of - leclairformar

Both Facebook and Microsoft said late Fri that they had been conferred permission from the U.S. government to disclose how numerous times the two companies had been asked to turn over user information to the Feds as disunite of a national security arrange.

However, the data comes with so many caveats that little entropy crapper be gleaned from information technology. For their take off, Google and Twitter opted extinct of similar disclosures, precisely for those reasons.

For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6000 and 7000 guilty and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. political entities, the fellowship said in a blog post. For its part, Facebook same 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 Defender and The President Washington Carry alleging that many of the World Wide Web's top companies have actively participated in a program, dubbed Prism, that supplied information on Vane searches, emails, and other user communications whenever the regime 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 late employee of the National Security Agency, subsequently outed himself as the source of the information.

The companies accused of participating in Optical prism.

Director of Public Intelligence James II R. Clapper then claimed that the Optical prism program would only collect entropy under court order, with an eye toward gathering foreign intelligence nether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Oregon FISA.

In response, Facebook and Microsoft asked the government to disclose national protection requests in its existing disclosures of data.

"For the first-year time, we are permitted to include the total volume of national security orders, which Crataegus oxycantha include FISA orders, in this reporting," Microsoft said Friday evening. "We are even so not permitted to confirm whether we have received any FISA orders, but if we were to have received any they would now be included in our combine volumes."

Microsoft and Facebook both same that they operated under a number of constraints imposed upon them by the federal government: Both were permitted to report FISA orders, but only when aggregated with law enforcement requests from all other U.S. local, state and federal constabulary enforcement agencies for a sextet-month period. Both companies were also asked to report their requests as a range of numbers. Microsoft, which has single Entanglement services that could be subject to FISA and other requests, was also required to report complete of the requests it acceptable for all of its services, in aggregate.

If all that sounds then vague to make up almost useless, well, Google felt the same way. Google told the Verge:

"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of governing requests," Google said. "We already issue criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the deuce categories together would be a step back up for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish conglomeration numbers of internal security requests, including FISA disclosures, individually."

Twitter agreed.

We agree with @Google: It's important to embody able to publish numbers of nationalist security requests—including Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act disclosures—separately.

— Benjamin Lee (@BenL) June 15, 2022

Both Microsoft and Facebook said that the requests were miniscule, compared to their user base, with Facebook claiming that IT represented less than a tiny fraction of hundredth of their user accounts.

"We hope this helps put into linear perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive," Facebook aforesaid.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452434/facebook-microsoft-disclose-fisa-requests-sort-of.html

Posted by: leclairformar.blogspot.com

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