Facebook now can say more on US user surveillance
MENLO PARK, California — Facebook's top attorney says that after negotiations with U.S. security officials the company has permission to make new, but still very limited, revelations about thousands of government orders to turn over user data.
Ted Ullyot, the company's general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the company was lobbying to reveal more.
In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been pressuring the Obama administration to loosen its legal gag on government surveillance orders after the Internet surveillance program code-named "PRISM" was revealed in leaks last week.
"Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately," a statement from Google said.
Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests — from all government entities, from local to federal — in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats.
The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.
Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.
"We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested," Ullyot said." And we respond only as required by law."
Facebook was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security-related requests, including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.
Ullyot said the company wanted to reveal the information because of "confusion and inaccurate reporting" on the issue, and to show that only "a tiny fraction of one percent" of its 1.1 billion users have been affected.
Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request and works aggressively to protect users' data.
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