PLEASE STOP with the snooping requests, begs Google as gov data demands skyrocket Worldwide government requests for access to Google's user data leapt by 15 per cent in the last six months, the ad giant said in its latest "Transparency Report" published on Monday. The company added that the demands from national authorities had ballooned 150 per cent since Google first made details of the requests public in …
They do have to pay the reasonable costs of satisfying the government's demands, and when it came out not all that long ago that they did so, Google and others were promptly accused of selling out theiir customers.
To a first approximation, that is what Prism is about.
Stop and think about it. Suppose you, for some reason, should be acquainted with and exchange email with someone under investigation in connection with a criminal offense like offering a bribe to a public official. Suppose further that the district attorney obtains a warrant requring Google to produce the suspect's email communications. Suppose, finally, that after the investigation is completed in a month or so the DA declines to prosecute on the basis that no criminal offense actually occurred. Would you wish the details of that warrant to be made public? Irrespective of your wishes in the circumstances, does it serve a public purpose to publicize it, or does it serve the public better to discard and forget it?
Things are not always what they seem at first to be, and not all warrants (or subpoenas, NSLs or other official requests) lead to further government action.
No need to actually read the provisions of any piece of US legislation. One can simply read the Title, and--if one is feeling particularly diligent--the initial (and blatantly self-serving) statements of purpose. At which point one can confidently assume that the legal effect of the specific legislative language is to do the exact opposite.
The data Google presents on their web site covers from 2009 forward, and court orders for such data existed for decades before that.
There is nothing new here, and not all that much to see either. Unless Google is lying by several orders of magnitude the number of requests and accounts affected is a tiny fraction of the population of internet users (what they report is in the order of 1/1000 of 1%). US government requests (at all levels of government) in criminal matters have grown about 32% annually over the last four and a half years and and the number of affected accounts about 25% annually over the three years for which Google presents data. FISA requests over the last four years have not changed much, but the number of affected accounts increased by around 50% annually, to a total of under 16000 for the second half of 2013. NSL activity appears to have changed little over the period. Against that, the annual growth in internet users appears to be about 12%, but the usage (proxied by traffic) has been growing at about 40% annually and the rate appears to be increasing. This is not grossly inconsistent with the reported growth in demands for data production.
Google is a big company and generates a lot of income. They are unlikely to be seriously inconvenienced by the reported volume of government data requests, especially in view of the fact the US government, at least, offsets part of their cost and Prism, whatever else it does, facilitates execution of the FISA requests.
He also sprinkled his blog post with a heavy-on-the-salt bit of lobbying by calling on Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to clarify that search warrants must be obtained before a service provider's user data is sifted through by spooks.
If requested user data is relevant to US citizens within the USA, then the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution holds. It REQUIRES a search warrant. No exceptions. Even the 'it's only metadata' rubbish is no excuse for no warrant. Take the issue to court, if the spooks insist upon traitorous behavior!
The only way US citizens on US soil can have their data slurped would be if data is legally collected from someone outside the USA with whom they've communicated. In that case, the spooks would NOT be asking for data from the US citizen, only gathering data relevant to the person outside the USA.
I'm sick of We The People in the USA being treated as idiots regarding our own Constitution by treasonous US spooks and their overlords.
There is somewhat more complexity to this than this post suggests. An example:
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Mohammed Atta would, in the lead up to the 9/11/2001 attack on the WTC and Pentagon, have been legal and quite reasonable targets for US intelligence collection and their emails could have been collected under FISA rules in effect both then and now. Several of the hijacking participants were legally present in the US various times before the attack; their email and other communications would not be allowed, either then or now, to be targeted under FiSA constraints. What about (hypothetical) email messages between them discussing the planning for that event?
As I understand it, such emails would be fair game, but the minimization rules require the US addressee's ID to be masked for any dissemination unless an appropriate court order is obtained. Some, and I include myself, think this is a reasonable compromise and much better than the alternative of discarding or foregoing collection of such messages because one of the addressees is a US person. And contrary claims notwithstanding, current law clearly allows collecting such communications.
Collection within the US probably requires a court order (not necessarily a warrant) for the collection activity; done outside the US, it would be subject to the laws of the country in which it is done, and might well be done illegally (but still could be legal under US law).
Well perhaps that's because they know that Google has been snooping on everyone's e-mails and web searches and so on for ages, so there's got to be some data worth having.
Maybe Google should think about how they could stop this happening...
No. Sorry. We deleted that.
(They can still model and profile users based on the data they do have before deleting it.)
User x is a B61.4a.
Oh, thanks. Can I see their emails?
Ok, but not their deleted ones. Right, your request has been logged and will be published publicly in 6 months time and the person concerned will be informed directly. If you need a 3 month extension we will require a court order within 5 months.
Er, but this is a case of national security.
Here, fill in form 27c in triplicate and mail it to the idgaf department. They will liaise with our legal team and get back to you in 7 months time.
But...
Here's your data. We have complied with your request. Is there anything else we can help you with today?
What's a B61.4a
That's an internal user rating.
But what does it mean?
I don't know. It's a computer generated code. Here's form 42d...
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