The US government is on a data-gathering spree at Google, new data from the search giant reveals.
Between January and June 2013, the US government issued nearly 11,000 requests to Google asking for user information, or about 42 percent of the global total. India was second with nearly 2,700 government requests.
The collective requests from governments around the world during that six-month period have more than doubled in the three-and-a-half years since Google's first government transparency report, which covered the second half of 2009. "
"We believe it's your right to know what kinds of requests and how many each government is making of us and other companies," Google Legal Director Richard Salgado wrote in the blog post. "However, the US Department of Justice contends that US law does not allow us to share information about some national security requests that we might receive. Specifically, the U.S. government argues that we cannot share information about the requests we receive (if any) under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But you deserve to know."
To underscore that point, Google posted a quartet of graphs illustrating the volume and nature of the government requests. In the fourth of the four graphs, to reflect the constraints on its ability to provide transparency on national security-related FISA requests, Google drew thick black lines over a barely visible bar chart, in the manner of a heavily redacted document.
FISA has become a hot-button topic this year after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released secrets on the US government's alleged spying activities. The US government has used FISA to block technology companies like Google from sharing what kind of requests they've received. Some of those companies brought a federal case earlier this year in an attempt to share that information. So far, those efforts have failed.
Source : CNET News
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