Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo have petitioned the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for the right to be more specific on the types of legal requests it receives from the government.
Further, Google also wants the FISC to “hold oral argument on this amended motion and that the argument be open to the public.” Google's new motion amends a previous one that it (and Microsoft) filed in June 2013, which simply asked for the right to publish the total number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.
According to Google's new court filing published (PDF) on Monday:
In particular, Google seeks a declaratory judgment that Google has a right under the First Amendment to publish, and that no applicable law or regulation prohibits Google from publishing, the total number of compulsory requests it receives under various national security authorities and the total number of users or accounts encompassed within such requests. To be clear, Google is not proposing to disclose the targets or substance of such requests, nor is it seeking the right to disclose any particular order as it is received. Instead, Google would report the aggregate number of active requests in each of the specified categories during the prior six months—the very same categories as proposed by the [Director of National Intelligence] and noted above—and the total aggregate number of users or accounts encompassed by each category of request.
Specifically, the company wants to be able to break out “FISA orders based on probable cause,” “Section 702 of FISA,” “FISA Business Records,” “FISA Pen Register/Trap and Trace,” and National Security Letters. Mountain View would add these categories to its existing transparency report.
Google regularly releases data on legal requests from governments around the world, as do many other companies (Yahoo joined the transparency parade last Friday). However, those figures simply represent the sum total of requests—be they local, state, or federal—and don’t break out those that are criminal or national security based in nature.
"We believe there is more information that the public deserves to know, and that would help foster an informed debate about whether government security programs adequately balance privacy interests when attempting to keep the public safe," wrote Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, on Monday. "In particular, although we have been permitted to disclose a range of the total number of requests we have received and the number of users associated with those requests, we have not been permitted to specify even approximately how many of those requests may be national security-related, nor have we been permitted to provide information identifying the number of those requests that seek the content of users’ accounts."
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