Internet giants seek more transparency in US disclosures act

Microsoft and Twitter have joined Google and Facebook in demanding the right to be able to publish more details about how many secret requests they receive to hand over user data to agencies like the NSA and the FBI under the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

"Permitting greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including FISA orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues," Microsoft said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

On Tuesday, Google said it has requested the US government to allow it to publish the numbers of national security requests.

In a letter to the offices of the attorney general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was posted on the company's official blog, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said the company asked ''to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures-in terms of both the number we receive and their scope …Google has nothing to hide.''

The request follows speculation in the media that the company's compliance of requests from the US government gives the government unfettered access to its users' data. Google said such assertions in the press are ''simply untrue.''

At Twitter the chief lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, tweeted, "We'd like more NSL (national security letter) transparency and Twitter supports efforts to make that happen."

A national security letter is used by US government agencies to demand access to data from companies - who are forbidden from revealing that they have been served such a request.

The American Civil Liberties Union also said that it has filed a lawsuit over the collection of data from Verizon customers ( See: Obama administration secretly collecting records of Verizon calls).

Google, Microsoft and Twitter publish "transparency reports" detailing how many government requests they receive for user data in various countries, but those for the US do not include FISA requests or other NSL demands.

Facebook has not so far published a transparency report.

Microsoft said, "Our recent report went as far as we legally could and the government should take action to allow companies to provide additional transparency."

The issue became controversial after a Guardian report last week that seven technology companies - Google, Facebook, Skype, PalTalk, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo - were involved in the Prism surveillance scheme run by the NSA.

The NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a "dropbox" system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system. That has allowed the companies to deny that there is "direct or indirect" NSA access, or a "back door" to their systems, and that they only comply with "legal" requests - while not explaining the scope of that access.

Twitter was not mentioned in the Prism programme because it declined to comply with the NSA's dropbox proposal.