Slashdot Mirror
Google: Government Requests For User Data Hit All-Time High In Second Half Of 2015 (zdnet.com)
Stephanie Condon, writing for ZDNet: Government requests for user data from Google hit an all-time high in the second half of 2015, the internet company revealed on Monday. Through July to December 2015, governments from around the globe made 40,677 requests, impacting as many as 81,311 user accounts. That's an 18 percent spike from the first half of 2015, when government requests for data impacted 68,908 users. By far and away, the most requests came from the United States, which made 12,523 data requests for this reporting period. The requests impacted 27,157 users or accounts. Google reports the number of user data requests it has received every six-month period going as far back as the second half of 2009. It started detailing the number of users and/or accounts impacted in the first half of 2011. "Usage of our services have increased every year, and so have the user data request numbers," the company noted. Since the second half of 2010, Google has reported the percentage of user data requests it at least partially complies with. For the second half of 2015, the company produced at least some data for 64 percent of requests. That figure has been about the same since 2013, but it's been trending slightly downward. Google complied with 79 percent of requests from the United States.
Demanding data from Google is so much less effort than real police work. It's the path of least resistance for the Wallys of the police world.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Google has how many subscribers now? Somehow, these numbers look astonishingly small
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance. The soviet attempt to quell unpatriotic behaviour in mass surveillance was only moderately successful in doing anything more than converting droves of citizens against the cause of the state. The chinese solution of blanket surveillance is so broken as to be unusable. with an untenable dearth of bulk garbage collected monthly the only solution is to ignore it, invent your charges, and hope they stick. most citizens have modern, functional VPN to subvert whats essentially a very expensive boilerplate.
the solution to americas terrorism problem is a review and modernization of our foreign policy from the carter doctrine of middle eastern interventionism. democracy as a pretext for dominionism has never been accepted outside of the US citizenry. its a fairy tale we tell ourselves through the nightly news to avoid the uncomfortable truth that we grant ourselves unfettered access to foreign resources through a rudimentary network of hollow dictators and an unspoken drone assassination campaign with no accountability. When youve made a group of people determined with nothing to lose, stripped them of security and purchase in their own land, and then marginalized their self-determination to a handful of platitudes about trade then they can and will strike back in a myriad of unpredictable means. your choice is to either chase the white dragon until you've exhausted all your resources in defense and you can no longer sustain the moral pretext of armed service, or you can stop the madness and focus on issues that kill far more of your citizenry than actual terrorism. heart disease, car crashes, alcoholism, and gun crime.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They do population monitoring and implement evil schemes for population control - how to make people dumber, more obedient, better tools, lesser humans.
Those numbers translate to about a 1 in 1000 chance that any particular person will be affected in their lifetime.
Assuming that they cover EVERYONE, of course.
And assuming that the request rate stays constant. There is no reason to believe that it will stay constant (especially since it's trending upwards as we speak). If the current growth rate of requests continues, then the chance of any particular person being affected in their lifetime will be 50:50 within 40 or 50 years.
Will the growth rate remain constant? Probably not. But it's more likely to increase than decrease - governments do like their new toys.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Comrades, we must all play our part in protecting the Homeland. With our corp-government parter, Google, we can finally stop these terrorist attacks from Eurasia once and for all!
Signed,
Your Leader
The big issues of the day are China and the South Sea.
These police deaths, as horrifying as they are to see, are well within the statistical normal. 2 Ambushes don't make a major trend and ambushing cops is not entirely new.
Being a police is a mildy dangerous job. It does not rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America because MOST criminals don't actually shoot back at all. Only 42 officers died last year being shot.
I suspect suicide actually killed more than criminals. This is because as the Dallas Chief suggesting, we are 'Asking our cops to do too much'.
We are asking them to go out into the public under the false pretense than their job is WAY more dangerous and construction work, when it's just not. It's not more dangerous than being a Cabi or deliver truck driver. Being on the road all the time is more dangerous than being a police officer.
That's not by accident, police do have a lot of protection and ppl are scared of them, but police death stats go back a long time and I suspect they are accurate enough. We have stats on all professions, especially death stats because you know people tend to notice when someone dies and why they died. With just that data we can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that being a police officer is not in the top 10 most dangerous professions. I don't know where it ranks.
140 dead out of 1.1 million makes me suspect it ranks quite low in lethal professions. Police also get a ton more benefits than other professions. They have special funds, added support from the public if they die in the line of duty, they get lots of free stuff.
Why are police getting all these perks and acting like their profession is so dangerous when in reality they are getting paid quite well for a less dangerous position and perks that other comparable non education required careers don't tend to offer. On top of that they are given special privileges by the law to protect them from investigation as well as Police Unions. They have proportionally way more charities also.
We are treating police more than nice enough. It's they who are not treating the people, their customers, well. Police training sucks, the Police Union needs to shut it's mouth and listen to the public. 1.1 million workers don't get to tell 332 million citizens how things should be. Police are our public employees. They are going to do the job within the bounds of what citizens say or citizens will get mad and eventually over decades of built up anger or just some bad mental health luck, you have events like this.
When police deaths double from 140 to 280 we can call it a major uptick, but even then. We are talking about 240 people out of 1.1 million. It's not worth national attention and it doesn't represent any real danger or crisis.
The real crisis is the way Americans mindlessly react to things on the media, without double checking, without thinking first, withing considering the repercussions. We are not going to hold the position of the worlds most powerful nation for much longer like this. When words come out of your mouth and you state them as fact, you outta know if they are true. It's not asking too much.
Does that take into account Google's exponential growth into new markets?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
...that have not yet been the subject of IRS spite audits. Obviously Obama wants to remedy that before leaving office...
The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance.
I certainly agree with that. However, I can't really see that it has anything to do with the story. Requests for data about 80K users out of, what, 2B? That's 0.004%, which is a very myopic panopticon. The US rate is a bit higher, 27K users out of, say, 150M (I'm just assuming that half of the US population has a Google account of some sort) is 0.02%, but that actually doesn't seem too excessive for supporting normal civil and criminal legal processes in a world where most people have significant electronic data in the cloud.
I'm not saying there isn't some crazy excessive surveillance going on, in fact I think there is. But the Google-reported numbers don't support it, so if the surveillance state is spying on us through our Google accounts, they're doing it without Google's knowledge.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
1) If they can only get ALL the data, then maybe they can make sense of it all...
2) Good training set for AI.
3) Cross-reference for the data they already mine elsewhere ( AT&T Verizon, Sprint).
4) They are bored with 9gag and want more giggles...
5) Complete data on all citizens, the "connection" network and how their propaganda flows.
Save the Date – Oracle Cloud Day
Registration is now open for Oracle Cloud Day coming to
London, Manchester and Dublin during November 2016.
The morning agenda will feature customer, partner and guest visionary speakers. In the afternoon, you can select the sessions which meet your business objectives, job role and cloud priorities within three themes:
Cloud Platform
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Development
Innovation to Grow. Insight to Control.
The keynote “Insight Driven Business” will showcase how unprecedented levels of insight gained from data are creating entirely new business categories. We will explore how business leaders are taking advantage of the economics of information and connections to power business growth.
Event Highlights
Customer, partner and visionary guest speakers
“The Interconnected Era” session from Equinix
Case studies, demos, use cases
Fast paced and interactive, including a panel discussion
Networking and meetups!
Multiple tracks for IT Leaders, Developers, Architects
Register Now and Continue Your Cloud Journey
With limited spaces available in all locations make sure you register and save the date in your calendar. Discover our latest cloud capabilities, hear customer case studies and learn how we can help deliver your cloud strategy.
We look forward to welcoming you to Oracle Cloud Days!
Regards,
Oracle Cloud UK & Ireland Team.
We’re glad that you’re interested in Oracle Solaris – the world’s first cloud operating system.
sure. pretending they have to request. Google is US gov.
Google has how many subscribers now? Somehow, these numbers look astonishingly small
Google has how many employees to process these requests now? Somehow, these numbers look annoyingly huge.
How much does this cost Google to process? How much more does this cost to resist if Google wants to try to protect its customers' data, how much more to research whether each particular customers deserves this effort?
Can Google bill the governments for this service? Does this qualify as a fifth-amendment "taking"? Can google sue for reimbursement of these costs?
How much does this cost Google in lost revenue from people who bail out, or don't join, rather than leave their sensitive data where it is subject to search without their knowledge, and potential disclosure?
How much does incurring these costs result in raised costs or reduced services for Google's customers? How many, and what, services might they have to terminate, or never deploy, or never even develop, because the money that might have provided them is instead eaten by servicing government information requests? How badly does this impact their business models, their stock price, their investors' returns?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By FAR the easiest SIGINT on a subject in a first world country will be via telemetry they're sending from their smartphone and computers, either consciously, not-really-thinking-about-it consciously, or via a hack.
It's safe to say that Google and Apple (smartphones/browsers) and Facebook (link tracking that's not done via Ad Words) have more raw data collection ability than the NSA natively does. That makes it trivial to tap into that feed as needed... But that's because anything the government *can* do there, *IS* being done by the commercial entities as part of their data aggregation business.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
You wouldn't ADMIT doing that. The word "reasonable" appears often in law. They may have be ordered to produce he data "promptly". The law generally requires one to act "in good faith". You can be slow, but admitting that you're PURPOSELY being slow responding to process is probably admitting that you're breaking the law.
They could, without saying anything, be slow. if ordered to turn over 30,000 emails, they could print out the body of each one on paper, without the meta-data, and deliver them in boxes several months later rather than just sending them as a 100 MB file. That's how our soon-to-be president responds to a subpoena, anyway.
There is an important unknown or two. When a stupid criminal records a video of themselves driving your car they stole and posts it to Youtube, then the police ask for the name of the person who uploaded it, maybe it's good for Youtube/Google to respond. We know that *some* of the requests are bad, we don't know what percentage.
I received a request for information from law enforcement in a high-profile case once. A teenage girl had gone missing. Foul play appeared likely. Someone on my message board was posting with the name of the missing girl (an unusual name). The detective asked if I had the email address used to set up the account or anything else which could help them get in touch with the person and rule out the possibility that it really was the missing girl who was posting. Or alternatively, if a convict who had done handyman work for the family of the missing girl was posting under her name, again the detective would want to talk to that person.
I was already assuming that Google's market penetration was 100% of the world's population.
Increase the chances and/or decrease time by whatever you assume to be Google's actual penetration (which, however slight, is enough to complete the offense)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Thank you for being one of the very few sensible participants in this discussion.
That's why I asked. The internet's market penetration in general, while large, is still less than 50%. Globalization's market penetration is larger, and it's only slightly more than 60%. The rest of the world is much too poor to bother with.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Re 'The soviet attempt to quell unpatriotic behaviour in mass surveillance was only moderately successful in doing anything more than converting droves of citizens against the cause of the state."
:)
The East European police forces and counter surveillance teams in the 1970-80's faced interesting issues and demands.
If they uncovered a plot by CIA, MI6 and other US funded pro democracy NGO's, more would have been expected from them again by their own govs and the Soviet Union.
Better just to keep looking at everyone, all the time over the years and create a lot of paperwork. A push for a public show in open court would end the expected budget, over time, better to keep working on open cases.
To be seen by the worlds press as having another Western supported "author" or "academic" arrested was also not useful long term.
Mil informants reporting on police informants, fake protest groups been set up to lure in Western diplomats, spies and funding just created more data on more people, usually other long term gov informants.
The West is now falling for the same big data collection trap. Too much data, no emerging AI, database product or trusted mil/gov humans can sort it all in time or over time if the interesting people are not using the networks. The interesting people just don't use networks as expected or as the contractors predicted they would based on their 1980's, 1990's projections and hardware upgrades. Bloggers, the press, random end users clog up expensive collection results with their ip's, deep searches, blogs, forums, chats, web 2.0, and gps data.
The West seems to have few issues with any VPN product or now onion routing usage and never really mentions them as a service to be blocked. More of a total collection trap
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It depends how a nation counts a request for data, per case or per person per call, per ip, per gov request per person, per phone tap or account with many other linked users been collected under the same one "users" roving court request.
A per case count request can hide huge amounts of data been collected on many people over a few years.
Other nations could count each ip, email, call as data accessed and as a request for data.
Using such per case reporting methods a "democracy" can get its vast court ready domestic surveillance collection to look very legal and as a small ratio to any user population per year..
The other trick is to track all metadata under color of law by working with providers and only then report select legal police intercepts that get to the open court stage.
Requests by any security related agencies may also not make lists in some nations. So the court related access numbers can be worked per case to look great while all national metadata is been requested.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The 80K and 27K figures were called out by Google as number of user accounts. The request numbers were smaller. It's in the summary.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What a brand can report in public based on its own internal numbers might not be the all that "public".
..."it is being replaced by more covert, unaccounted forms of surveillance. Favored methods may include social media monitoring or, as National Security Agency whistle-blowers in the United States have alleged, dragnet interception systems that function outside the law."
..."as a single interception request may sometimes include dozens of individual targets."
...."with a single communications data order garnering information on hundreds, even thousands, of individuals"
Other methods, NSL can sway any data reporting. What Country Monitors Communications the Most: U.S., U.K., Canada, or Australia? (July 18 2012)
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Google reports NSL statistics, though with lower precision, based on the deal they worked out with the government. Beyond that, sure, it's possible that the NSA is using covert means without the company's cooperation or knowledge. We know from Snowden's files that at one point they were tapping network connections between Google data centers. Those are encrypted now, but there might be other ways. However, this story provides no evidence one way or the other, and based on this information, the "panopticon" isn't seeing very much and, as I said at the top of this thread, discussions of all-pervasive surveillance aren't related to this story.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.