Facebook, Microsoft flooded with user data requests from US govt

Technology giants Microsoft and Facebook said last night that requests from US government agencies to turn over user data ran into thousands in just the last six months of 2012, according to a Fox News report.

According to the report, representatives of both companies said, after negotiations with national security officials, their companies were given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders requesting user data.

According to a statement by Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, Facebook was only allowed to talk about total numbers and was not to reveal any specifics. However, he said, the permission it had received was still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.

According to Ullyot, the requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.

Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said, over the last six months of 2012, Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities - from local to federal - on various topics, involving the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.

The social network was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject.

The revelations come after Facebook and Microsoft struck agreements with the US government for the release of limited information about the number of surveillance requests they received, in what comes as a modest victory for the companies as they continue to struggle with the fallout from disclosures about a secret government data-collection programme.

All such requests under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa, including their existence, had hitherto been deemed secret.

Microsoft revealed it had received requests of all types for information on about 31,000 consumer accounts in the second half of 2012. In a "transparency report", which Microsoft published earlier this year without including national security matters, it said it had received criminal requests involving 24,565 accounts for the whole of 2012.

Google said late yesterday that it was negotiating with the government and that the sticking point was whether it could only publish a combined figure for all requests. It added that would be "a step back for users", as it already broke out criminal requests and national security letters, another type of intelligence inquiry.