Why the Latest FISA Release By Google Et Al. Means Squat

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google, Yahoo, and other tech firms are offering some updated statistics about government requests for data. There's just one problem: under revised guidelines issued by the federal government, those companies can still only report a range, rather than a definitive number, for those requests. If that wasn't fuzzy enough, the range can only be reported after a six-month lag. Between January and June 2013, Google received between 0-999 FISA 'non-content' requests on 0-999 user accounts; it also fielded between 0-999 'content' requests for between 9000 and 9999 user accounts.Yahoo actually received a larger number of FISA queries than Google: for the first six months of 2013, the federal government made between 0-999 requests on between 30,000 and 30,999 user accounts hosted by the company. ... These companies have little choice but to advocate this new information release as a huge step forward for transparency. Unfortunately, restricting government data requests to a broad range isn't very helpful: for example, a range (rather than a single numerical value) makes it difficult to determine trends, such as whether government requests are gradually increasing over the long term."

Comments

Alas, it's not quite there yet, yet

[davecb]

My personal copy is quite broken at the moment

Eric Schmidt says “spying is the nature of o

[pigsycyberbully]

Google has been fined 900,000 euros for breaking Spanish data protection laws. + Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated Internet search engine giant Google for illegally collecting personal data such as passwords, emails and other online activities from Wi-Fi networks in homes and businesses across the United States and around the rest of the world. In November Google agreed to pay a $17m fine to settle allegations that it secretly tracked web users by placing special digital files on the web browsers of their smartphones. Google’s Eric Schmidt says “spying is the nature of our society there’s been spying for years, there’s been surveillance for years.” http://google-spyware.com/