Why the Latest FISA Release By Google Et Al. Means Squat

Nerval's Lobster writes "Google, Yahoo, and other tech firms are offering some updated statistics about government requests for data. There's just one problem: under revised guidelines issued by the federal government, those companies can still only report a range, rather than a definitive number, for those requests. If that wasn't fuzzy enough, the range can only be reported after a six-month lag. Between January and June 2013, Google received between 0-999 FISA 'non-content' requests on 0-999 user accounts; it also fielded between 0-999 'content' requests for between 9000 and 9999 user accounts.Yahoo actually received a larger number of FISA queries than Google: for the first six months of 2013, the federal government made between 0-999 requests on between 30,000 and 30,999 user accounts hosted by the company. ... These companies have little choice but to advocate this new information release as a huge step forward for transparency. Unfortunately, restricting government data requests to a broad range isn't very helpful: for example, a range (rather than a single numerical value) makes it difficult to determine trends, such as whether government requests are gradually increasing over the long term."

Have a good one

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"for example, a range (rather than a single numerical value) makes it difficult to determine trends"

Well, a sudden, obvious surge in requests could alert terrorist planners somebody was on to them. That's probably behind both the large ranges and six month delays.

Re:Classic Slashdot

[MozeeToby]

Agreed, the classic system is IMO the best comment board on the web today. Why not focus on incremental improvements, getting mobile to work properly, etc? Look, I understand that the beta site has been someone's baby for the past couple years but it's just not a step forward from what exists today. Pushing it to all users would be a mistake.

Re:Classic Slashdot

[steamraven]

Interestingly, the things they need to fix are not fixed in the Beta: Like Unicode handling. Its not like this is an international site or anything.