Verizon Transparency Report: Govt Requests Increasing

Gunkerty Jeb writes "After months of public calls from privacy advocates and security experts, Verizon on Wednesday released its first transparency report, revealing that it received more than 164,000 subpoenas and between 1,000 - 2,000 National Security Letters in 2013. The report, which covers Verizon's landline, Internet and wireless services, shows that the company also received 36,000 warrants, most of which requested location or stored content data."

Re:Math Needs Improvement Then

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Maybe Verizon signed up 1.7 million new subscribers in the USA in the 4th quarter of 2013, but certainly Verizon has more than 1.7 million wireless customers. The market of wireless customers is in excess of 100 million in the USA and there are a very small pool of wireless providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile).

FISA

[game kid]

From the report:

Does this Transparency Report include information on the number of national security orders you receive?

We report only information about National Security Letters. Like all other companies to issue transparency reports, we are not permitted at this time to report information on national security orders (like FISA orders).

So (before you ask) it does not account for the April 2013 secret FISA Hoover-order or any other such.

Re:Math Needs Improvement Then

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Added: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money... [turner.com] Chart.

Re:Oops

[jklovanc]

You are assuming that the requests are all coming from the NSA. The only mention of the NSA in the article is in relation to Snowden. There are many other government agencies other than the NSA, including local police, who make these requests. There are many different crimes that might prompt such requests; organized crime, drug dealing, murder, extortion, etc. For example, the first thing done in most murder investigations where a phone is missing is to dump the phone. Even when the phone is available, the history may have been deleted as drug dealers often do.

If all the requests did come from the NSA it might be bad but they didn't. In the end we have no idea how many requests came from the NSA and blaming them for all the requests is invalid. This knee jerk "if it is surveillance it must be the NSA" is getting out of hand.

Not all of it is Terrorist related...

[ThermalRunaway]

My sister is a defense attorney. She is responsible for a few of those subpoena items in 2013. None of them for anything remotely related to national security or terrorists. The last one was some dispute about a winning state lottery ticket... she had to get the txt msg records for her client and the other person.