US Gov't Demands For Google Data Up 37% Over the Last Year

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Governments are sticking their noses into Google's servers more than ever before. In the second half of 2011, Google received 6,321 requests that it hand over its users' private data to U.S. government agencies including law enforcement, and complied at least partially with those requests in 93% of cases, according to the latest update to the company's bi-annual Transparency Report. That's up from 5,950 requests in the first half of 2011, and marks a 37% increase in the number of requests over the same period the year before. Compared with the second half of 2009, the first time Google released the government request numbers, the latest figures represent a 76% spike. Data demands from foreign governments have increased even more quickly than those from the U.S., up to 11,936 in the second half of 2011 compared with 9,600 in the same period the year before, though Google was much less likely to comply with those non-U.S. government requests."

Comments

It's not a "demand" -- it's a request

[daveschroeder]

That's why it's called a "request". Words mean things.

So what's driving the requests?

There's far more information to request. Whether or not you agree with the notion of government requests for information, would you really expect requests to remain flat, or go down, when the pool from which information is being requested is getting dramatically larger? Yes, it's newsworthy -- that's why you're reading this story -- but it's not inappoprtiate.

It's a request -- it is not illegal for the the US government to make a request of a business. It has never been illegal, and this is not some kind of "post-9/11" construct as some will assert. Government has been able to ask business for assistance since the founding of our country, and it does not run counter to the letter or spirit of the Constitution. Government is part of our society, and it is lawful for it to communicate with other components of our society.

Government cannot compel a particular response without a warrant or court order: Google is not obligated to respond to the a request that is not accompanied by a warrant or court order in any particular way. Google may CHOOSE to comply with a request because there is nothing inappropriate about a business deciding to comply with a lawful request from a government agency. Fortunately, if you don't like Google's policy, you can choose not to use it.

In other words, if you have an issue with Google complying with a US government request, your problem isn't with the US government -- it's with Google.

Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou told me in an interview prior to the data’s release that one example of the requests might be for the IP addresses of users who log into their Google accounts, which law enforcement agents use to locate individuals involved in criminal cases such as kidnapping.

She says Google requires that the requests are submitted in a written form, come from the appropriate agency, cite a criminal case and are sufficiently narrow in their demands in terms of which users are affected and what time frame of data is requested. "The data can often be very critical to a case," says Chou. "We want to show that we're advocating on your behalf. But we also want to do right by the spirit and letter of the law."

[...]

"We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not," reads the post from Google’s Chou. "Just like every other time before, we've been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship."

For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.

See also Google's official blog post.

Re:It's not a "demand" -- it's a request

[betterunixthanunix]

It's clever, because it means you don't have to confront the truth, which is that there is nothing wrong with a government in a free society asking a business for help, and nothing wrong with a business deciding to provide that help. It's not illegal, and doesn't run afoul of the Constitution.

You are ignoring the very real expectation that people have that their email will enjoy the same privacy as their postal mail and their phone conversations. Google does not make its policy of complying with US government requests clear to its users (it is an ambiguous statement buried in the privacy policy), and the US government has not been forthcoming about its cozy relationship with Internet companies. People have every reason to think that a court order would be required before the government can receive their information from Google, because that is how things work with their telephone conversations.

This is a legal loophole that should be closed, not defended. The Stored Communications Privacy Act was written before the Internet became a widely used medium of communication. At the time, most computer users understood how emailed worked and understood that their email was being sent in the clear through another person's computer system, and they did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That is not true today; the majority of computer users today have no idea how email works, they think of it as a fancy version of postal mail, and they have no understanding of the privacy implications of sending plaintext email (or that there is even an alternative). The logic behind the SCPA is twenty years out of date.

Yes, there is a problem with the government asking businesses for "help," when the purpose in doing so is to avoid legal and constitutional requirements. If Google did not comply with these sorts of requests, the government would have to either violate the law or turn to the court system to get wiretap orders and so forth. That is how the system is supposed to work: your communications are supposed to be private except when a warrant is issued, and warrants are not supposed to be issued unless probable cause can be shown. This friendly, "Hey Google, you think you could give us all the information you have about Joe Schmoe," system is not the sort of system we are supposed to have in this country.

Really, the idea that Google was pressured by the government is not that far-fetched, given the government's behavior in the past, and it is optimistic for Google -- the company that claims it will "do no evil." Sure, evidence is lacking, which is a result of the secrecy that surrounds police operations. We really do not know how these requests are being made. Is Google being pressured? Did Google propose the idea of this sort of relationship to the government? Does Google use its cooperation as a bargaining chip when it wants to build a new data center or lay some new fiber?

This is a matter of preserving the principles upon which the US was founded. The government is not supposed to be all-powerful, and the panopticon is not supposed to exist here. Our privacy is supposed to be violated only after a careful legal procedure, only after a judge is convinced of a legitimate investigative need.

Re:It's not a "demand" -- it's a request

[betterunixthanunix]

To protect our rights from police abuses. We require police to get a warrant from the courts to ensure that there is no single branch of government that can unilaterally violate your privacy or freedom. We do not want the police running around making their own decisions; the judge that signs a warrant is supposed to be a check against an out-of-control police force.

"76% spike"

[John Hasler]

No, a 76% increase. "Spike" implies that it went up quickly and then immediately came back down, forming a spike on a graph. Thus only in the unlikely event that it comes back down next year can you legitimately call it a spike. Yes, I'm being picky.