Randal Milch

Verizon released our Transparency Report for the first half of 2014. We’ve tried to include more data and more specificity. We hope that this Report will add to the ongoing discourse about government demands for customer data and, more generally, about privacy and public safety. Although we continue to receive large numbers of demands, the overall percent of our customers affected remains very small.

We received more subpoenas than any other type of legal process in the first half of the year in the United States, but those approximately 72,500 subpoenas sought information regarding only approximately one tenth of one percent of our United States customers. Moreover, each subpoena typically seeks information about a small number of customers: ninety percent of the subpoenas sought information about three or fewer customers. In fact, the average number of customers whose information was demanded through a single subpoena was less than two. We also continue to take positions in support of privacy that are not as public.

While it may not make the headlines, Verizon commonly pushes back against legal demands, forcing law enforcement agencies to narrow the scope of their requests, correct errors in their demands, or issue a different form of legal process before we will produce a specific type of data. Through these processes we rejected a number of demands from law enforcement completely and did not produce some of the information sought through other law enforcement demands.

A magistrate judge in New York recently ruled that the United States government could use a search warrant to obtain an individual customer’s emails that Microsoft stored in Dublin, Ireland. The decision is contrary to well-accepted law that US courts are not empowered to issue warrants for foreign searches.

As important, the decision failed to take into account substantial international commerce and policy implications of an “extra-territorial” warrant.

It is worth noting that the consumer Internet-based email services at issue in the case before this magistrate judge are quite different from cloud computing and hosting services offered to business customers. We do not believe the magistrate judge’s decision would apply to Verizon’s non-US cloud services, where these overseas business customers process and/or store their data directly on servers outside the US.