January 2014

The Justice Department has agreed to relax its long-standing gag order on certain types of sensitive data requests made to companies, allowing them for the first time to publicize -- in broad terms -- how often they must furnish customer information to the government, US officials announced.

The agreement, struck in response to legal challenges from Google, Microsoft and other technology companies, comes as part of President Obama’s effort to ease the secrecy around government intelligence-gathering in the aftermath of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The new policy will allow companies to report on national security letters -- a form of administrative subpoena -- as well as on requests from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). However, they will be permitted to disclose the volume of requests only in wide numerical ranges. The same rules will apply to requests from the FISC. Companies will also have the option of lumping the two categories of data requests together in a single total. If they do so, the numeric range can be in smaller bands, such as between “zero and 249,” according to the Justice Department. US officials have said that more-precise reporting might tip targets off to investigations.

Verizon released a Transparency Report outlining the number of law enforcement requests for customer information that we received in 2013. In the report we noted that in 2013 we did not receive any demands from the United States government for data stored in other countries. Although we would not expect to receive any such demands, there are persistent myths and questions about the US government’s ability to access customer data stored in cloud servers outside the US.

Now is a good time to dispel these inaccuracies and address the questions, which have been exacerbated by the stream of news reports since last June about national intelligence activities in the US and elsewhere. Our view on the matter is simple: the US government cannot compel us to produce our customers’ data stored in data centers outside the US, and if it attempts to do so, we would challenge that attempt in court. So, where does this leave the government when it wants access to data stored outside the US? The short answer is the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process, which the US government can -- and we understand does -- use to request assistance from local, in-country law enforcement, just as other governments around the world do.

President Barack Obama’s planned reforms to the National Security Agency (NSA) “will do serious damage to US intelligence collection capabilities,” the hawkish Center for Security Policy warned.

The report criticized the president’s planned reforms and said that his speech announcing a path forward seemed to deride intelligence agency staffers. President Obama said that the NSA should require a court order before searching the bulk collection of records about nearly all Americans’ phone calls. He also announced his intent to transfer the database out of government hands. The Center for Security Policy report said that requiring court orders will “bog [the program] down with bureaucracy and lawyers, making it much harder to use.” “Moreover, this rule will put judges in an intelligence policy role that should be left to senior intelligence officials,” it added.