Verizon transparency report reveals 320,000 data requests in 2013

Verizon says federal, state and local authorities asked it to hand over user data 321,545 times in 2013, in a report it vowed to produce following the National Security Agency revelations made by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The vast majority of requests, about 164,000, came from law enforcement subpoenas, followed by about 71,000 court orders. In 2013, the company fielded 7,800 requests for real-time information about a person's outbound and inbound calls — but of those, only about 1,500 were actual wiretap requests leading to the surveillance of a call's content. The report also shows a growing government appetite for location data. In 2013, the company saw 35,000 requests for such information. Some 3,200 constituted "tower dumps," or information on all the calls logged by a cell tower within a certain time frame. This information can be used to track a suspect's movements and behavior. According to a congressional probe, law enforcement agencies made 9,000 tower dump requests in 2013 -- meaning Verizon was the recipient of more than a third of them.