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Apple Reports 400 Percent Rise In National Security Requests (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Apple received a record number of national security orders this year, according to its bi-annual report published this week. The company stated it received more than 13,250 national security requests affecting over 9,000 accounts in the first half of 2017. Compared to the same period in 2015, this represents a threefold increase. National Security Requests are subpoenas by the government which oblige companies or individuals to share their data for national security purposes. The requests are usually made in the form of National Security Letters and are demanded only when it's indispensable to an investigation. The reason for this rise in numbers is still unclear. The company also revealed it provided data in 44 non-civil governmental cases, information which hadn't been revealed in its previous reports.
Impeach the fucking criminal administration that investigates critics and compliments the KKK. Fuck all Trump trash.
George W. Bush and Obama were people who at least cared a tiny, tiny amount about civil liberties even as they established precedents which were easily abused. And now, we're seeing what happens when one has people in charge (Trump and Sessions) who don't even bother pretending that they care about civil liberties.
Sounds like somebody's enjoying being in charge of the Deep State. Who could have guessed?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Considering how we have investigators looking under everyone's bed on the hunt for Red October, I'm surprised it's only a 400 percent increase.
[...] National Security Letters [...] are demanded only when it's indispensable to an investigation.
This is demonstratively untrue, as has become clear even through the usually attached gag orders on the NSLs: An NSL is simply more convenient to issue, carries a lower burden of proof on the requester, and neatly shuts up the requestee. Oh, and NSLs aren't "requests" as there's basically no way to decline. But hey, at least they're overseen by a court, right? By a secret court, in secret, following secret rules. Such "requests".
These things are highly corrosive to due process and that thing so elusive you don't even have a word for it, but the Germans and Dutch call "rechtsstaat". Go look it up. It means that NSLs prove the government entirely untrustworthy.
Yes, if Mr. Orange would want to really MAGA, he could do worse than just forbid NSLs entirely.
Why are they comparing 2017 to 2015? Did anyone else notice they skipped 2016?
I guess someone read the how to lie with statistics book.
Which is it?
Iphones are ubiquitous products and I'm not surprised to find a large focus on mining the resulting information.
Yeah ... It is a real mystery why there is a sudden spike in fascism in the US. Make Americans Grip Ankles! #MAGA
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This public service announcement brought to you by liberals.
Apple gadgets don't throw off user data to Apple ecosystem beyond the meta, storefronts, and iCloud. I wonder if the increase in NSL's going Apple's way is for iCloud stuff, and the increase reflects Apple's organically increasing cloud-user base instead of newfound zealotry on part of DoJ. Other companies - especially Google's - numbers on this front will be that much more interesting.
Excuse me, but a "threefold increase" as quoted in the summary does not equal a "400 percent rise" as mentioned in the headline.
Who writes these headlines and where did they learn to do arithmetic?? For the record, a threefold increase equals a 200% rise. Maybe this evident innumeracy is somehow connected with the apparent rise in fascism mentioned by another reader.
The NSA admitted to sharing nude pictures amongst their workers. We all know how informative this is in the struggle against terrorism.
So why not make it official with a request to apple?
PS: I wish I was trolling but we all know how effective mass surveillance is.
when you collect everything that Apple steals and sucks up from your phone, from tens of thousands of people, then it's not an "investigation", it's wide-and-far spying and theft of personal data.
Apple happily facilitates it, remember that before you buy your next phone.
A look at the original reports reveals that actually both the "threefold" and the "by 400%" claims are completely wrong.
The number ranges (apparently there are regulations banning Apple from giving specific numbers) for the requests are: 750-999 for 1H2015, 2750-2999 for 1H2016, 13250-13499 for 1H2017. Taking the mean to represent each band, we can see that from 2015 to 2017 the number of requests actually increased 15.3 times (or by 1430 percent if you like that notation). The increase from 2015 to 2016 was 3.3 times (or 230%) and the increase from 2016 to 2017 was 4.7 times (or 370%).
The number ranges for the affected accounts are: 250-499 for 1H2015, 2000-2249 for 1H2016, 9000-9249 for 1H2017. So, from 2015 to 2017 the number of affected accounts increased 24.4 times (or by 2340 percent). The increase from 2015 to 2016 was 5.7 times (or 470%) and the increase from 2016 to 2017 was 4.3 times (or 330%).