August 27, 2013 7:07 pm
US tops league of governments probing Facebook users
Facebook received more demands from the US government for information about its users than from all other countries combined, the social network said on Tuesday.
The publication of Facebook’s first transparency report follows weeks of disclosures about US intelligence agencies’ Prism programme and other data-gathering techniques that have raised questions about the scale and legality of online surveillance conducted in the name of national security.
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Facebook’s data aligns with similar disclosures byGoogle and Twitter that suggest the US makes much more frequent demands for personal information about the people using these sites than other countries.
The 11,000 to 12,000 user data requests thatFacebook received from the US authorities in the first six months of 2013, covering 20,000 to 21,000 individuals, marks a 20 per cent increase in the number of requests over the second half of last year.
That compares with Google’s 8,438 US requests in the second half of last year, relating to 14,791 accounts, about 40 per cent of its total.
Facebook said it complied with 79 per cent of the latest requests for information such as names, IP addresses and account contents. It did not provide additional details about what information it gave to the US government but said that the “vast majority” involved criminal cases, rather than national security matters.
After the US, governments requesting the most data from Facebook included India, with 3,245, Germany, Italy and France. It handed over more than two-thirds of the 2,337 accounts about which the UK government demanded details.
“We have stringent processes in place to handle all government data requests,” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel said, repeating his call for “greater transparency” from the authorities in these situations.
“We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request. We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests.”
Privacy International “commended” Facebook for the disclosure, which it said had been a “long time coming”, but noted that leaks from the US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden suggested that governments were collecting user data from telecoms networks and other means that may not require web companies’ co-operation.
“The usefulness of transparency reports hinges on governments abiding by the rule of law,” Privacy International said.
“We now know that these reports only provide a limited picture of what is going on, and it is time that governments allow companies to speak more freely regarding the orders they receive.”
Facebook said the report “contains the total number of requests we’ve received from each government, including both criminal and national security requests”, and that it would publish regular updates to the figures.
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PS For criminal cases the FBI do request regular federal court warrants. If it is for vaguely defined intelligence gathering it is laughable to presume that so many hoops must be jumped to hobble the efficiency.