BackGoogle urges foreign intelligence court to let it release data
Firm seeking to publish aggregate numbers, scope of national security requests it receives from the US to promote transparency
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Washington: Google Inc. urged the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to publish the aggregate numbers and scope of national security requests it receives from the US government.
The filing with the secret court, which issues warrants for collecting foreign intelligence inside the US, is the latest effort by Google to ease restrictions on disclosing the information the government has asked for under the surveillance program code-named Prism.
Google, along with other technology companies, including Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc., is seeking greater latitude to disclose information about the government requests for user data collected by intelligence agencies.
“We have long pushed for transparency so users can better understand the extent to which governments request their data—and Google was the first company to release numbers for National Security Letters," Niki Fenwick, a spokeswoman for Google in Washington, said in an e-mail. “To promote greater transparency, the company is seeking to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately," she said.
Google is seeking a declaration from the court that would allow it to release the statistics without violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, according to the filing, which was provided by Google.
Corporate scrutiny
The role of private companies has come under scrutiny since Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency, disclosed this month that the agency is collecting millions of US residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google and other Internet companies under court order.
Prism traces its roots to warrantless domestic-surveillance efforts under former president George W. Bush. According to slides provided by Snowden, Prism gathers e-mails, videos and other private data of foreign surveillance targets through arrangements that vary by company and are overseen panel of judges who work in secret.
Google, based in Mountain View-California, asked the FISA court to affirm it has the right under the First Amendment to publish, and that no applicable law or regulation prohibits Google from publishing, statistics on the requests, including the total number of users or accounts implicated by the requests, according to the filing.
Sheldon Snook, a spokesman for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, declined to comment on the filing.
Yahoo disclosure
Yahoo! Inc., on Tuesday became the latest technology company to give details of government data collection, following disclosures by Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp., all of whom have revealed thousands of warrants for data from government entities.
Yahoo!, the largest US Web portal, said it got as many as 13,000 requests for information from US law enforcement agencies in the six months ending in May, with the most common types related to fraud, homicides and criminal investigations, Yahoo said in a posting on Tumblr. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said it can’t lawfully break out FISA requests, and it urged the US government to reconsider its stance on the issue.
Google said it’s pushing authorities to let it differentiate between varying types of government requests.
“Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests—as some companies have been permitted to do—would be a backward step for our users," said Google’s Fenwick.
Terrorist attacks
Intelligence-gathering efforts by the US have helped prevent more than 50 terrorist attacks in more than 20 countries, including one planned on the New York Stock Exchange, government officials said in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.
John Chris Inglis, NSA deputy director, said at the hearing that the agency approved inquiries on fewer than 300 phone numbers in 2012.
“Surveillance of communications between a known al-Qaeda extremist in Yemen and an individual in the US allowed the FBI to detect a nascent plot to bomb the exchange and arrest those involved," Sean Joyce, deputy director of the bureau, said.
“Monitoring of foreigners’ Internet activity also helped in the discovery of a plot to bomb the office of a Danish newspaper that published cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad," Joyce said.
That plot involved David Headley, a Pakistani-American who was arrested in 2009 for helping to plot the 2008 shooting and bombing attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Headley was convicted in January in a US federal court for his role in the attacks.
Plots disrupted
Government officials last week said surveillance helped the U.S. to disrupt a plot to bomb the New York City subway system.
The disclosures by Snowden, who also previously worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, have sparked a criminal inquiry by the Justice Department as well as a review by US intelligence agencies of how the leak occurred.
Snowden, 29, fled to Hong Kong last month before revealing himself as the source, and US lawmakers said they want to know more about what led him to act. Bloomberg
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