The first phone company to publish a transparency report isn’t AT&T or Verizon

Ever since we learned that the country's phone companies were handing vast amounts of data to the government under court order, pressure has been mounting for them to publish a Silicon Valley-type transparency report detailing how exactly they're complying. Now the first such report is out. But instead of coming from industry mainstays such as Verizon or AT&T, the disclosure comes from a little-known, left-leaning service known as CREDO Mobile.

For the unfamiliar, San Francisco-based CREDO is a progressive organization that supports causes like marriage equality and environmental activism. Its wireless service arm is a small part of that, with around 125,000 subscribers. But the operation helps subsidize the broader organization's political activity, and it's probably safe to say that CREDO Mobile customers are generally in it for ideological reasons. Still, CREDO Mobile operates just like any other phone service. It partners with Sprint and piggybacks off of its network to provide cellular service to its users. And that means it's subject to the same data requests that its larger cousins routinely face. According to CREDO Mobile's transparency report, federal, state and local authorities summoned user data from the company 16 times in 2013. That isn't a lot. It makes sense.