Americas...:Tech Firms Release Details of US Spying of Their...

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Tech Firms Release Details of US Spying of Their Users

Local Editor

Freed by a recent legal deal with government lawyers, major technology firms released new data Monday on how often they are ordered to turn over customer information for secret national security investigations - figures that show that the government collected data on thousands of Americans.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo released reports on Monday disclosing that the National Security Agency requested for private information from at least 59,000 user accounts in the first half of last year under orders from a secret court.

California-based Internet giant Yahoo topped the list as it received requests for "content" from at least 30,000 customers. Yahoo was followed by Microsoft which received user data requests for at least 15,000 accounts.

At least 9,000 Google accounts, 5,000 Facebook accounts, and 250 LinkedIn accounts were also affected by the US government's user information requests.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders also asked for "non-content" information including data about the times, senders, and recipients of email communications.

The reports followed the tech firms' lawsuits against the US government last summer which asked the government to loosen the rules preventing them from publishing information about the types of user data requests they receive from the US intelligence community.

The companies' determination to make that information public came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leaks brought to light the scope and scale of the agency's spying activities both at home and abroad.

The NSA collects nearly 5 billion cellphone records a day, which enables the spy agency to track people's movements and map their relationships.

Source: Websites