Verizon’s first transparency report sheds no light on NSA data collection

Anyone hoping to get insight into Verizon’s cooperation with National Security Agency will be sorely disappointed. Verizon prohibited from revealing any information about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders, which are at the heart of an international controversy over the NSA collecting subscriber metadata indiscriminately from phone companies.

The closest Verizon got was to reveal that it had received between 1,000 and 1,999 national security letters (NSLs) from the FBI. NSLs are requests for specific subscriber data pertaining to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation, and they don’t need the signature of a judge. But they’re not the same things as FISA orders. Verizon isn’t being cagey. Everyone in the tech industry is under a similar gag order when it comes to FISA and the government’s secretive spy courts. Still, the information Verizon did reveal in its report was interesting. The greatest number of (non-FISA) requests it received came in the form of law enforcement subpoenas for subscriber information. It processed 164,184 of those subpoenas in 2013. It received 70,665 court orders to provide subscriber historical subscriber data or real-time info via pen registers or trap-and-traces, as well as 36,696 warrants mostly for stored content or location information.