Google: Government Requests For User Data Hit All-Time High In Second Half Of 2015 (zdnet.com) 41
Stephanie Condon, writing for ZDNet: Government requests for user data from Google hit an all-time high in the second half of 2015, the internet company revealed on Monday. Through July to December 2015, governments from around the globe made 40,677 requests, impacting as many as 81,311 user accounts. That's an 18 percent spike from the first half of 2015, when government requests for data impacted 68,908 users. By far and away, the most requests came from the United States, which made 12,523 data requests for this reporting period. The requests impacted 27,157 users or accounts. Google reports the number of user data requests it has received every six-month period going as far back as the second half of 2009. It started detailing the number of users and/or accounts impacted in the first half of 2011. "Usage of our services have increased every year, and so have the user data request numbers," the company noted. Since the second half of 2010, Google has reported the percentage of user data requests it at least partially complies with. For the second half of 2015, the company produced at least some data for 64 percent of requests. That figure has been about the same since 2013, but it's been trending slightly downward. Google complied with 79 percent of requests from the United States.
Least amount of effort (Score:2)
Demanding data from Google is so much less effort than real police work. It's the path of least resistance for the Wallys [wikipedia.org] of the police world.
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They are making encryption into a money-saving business decision. By simply making sure that they can't access the data that is being requested they can save a fortune on responding to these requests. Even when law enforcement pays for them the full cost is never recovered.
Better to shrink the department down to a script that just responds to requests with "sorry, we don't have that data" if possible.
"Reasonable" and "promptly". Also video of crime (Score:2)
You wouldn't ADMIT doing that. The word "reasonable" appears often in law. They may have be ordered to produce he data "promptly". The law generally requires one to act "in good faith". You can be slow, but admitting that you're PURPOSELY being slow responding to process is probably admitting that you're breaking the law.
They could, without saying anything, be slow. if ordered to turn over 30,000 emails, they could print out the body of each one on paper, without the meta-data, and deliver them in boxes
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Yeah but I think we should at least be grateful that information about how many requests is being shared with the public. When I was a kid, that kind of thing would neverhave happened. (of course google didn't exist back then either) but the poont is at least we have an idea how much is going on, and that knowledge is a LOT more than we used to have.
Re: Least amount of effort (Score:2)
Alleged signal?
And what percentage of the full user base is that? (Score:3)
Google has how many subscribers now? Somehow, these numbers look astonishingly small
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Those numbers translate to about a 1 in 1000 chance that any particular person will be affected in their lifetime.
Assuming that they cover EVERYONE, of course.
And assuming that the request rate stays constant. There is no reason to believe that it will stay constant (especially since it's trending upwards as we speak). If the current growth rate of requests continues, then the chance of any particular person being affected in their lifetime will be 50:50 within 40 or 50 years.
Will the growth rate remai
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Does that take into account Google's exponential growth into new markets?
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I was already assuming that Google's market penetration was 100% of the world's population.
Increase the chances and/or decrease time by whatever you assume to be Google's actual penetration (which, however slight, is enough to complete the offense)....
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That's why I asked. The internet's market penetration in general, while large, is still less than 50%. Globalization's market penetration is larger, and it's only slightly more than 60%. The rest of the world is much too poor to bother with.
Look huge to me. (Score:3)
Google has how many subscribers now? Somehow, these numbers look astonishingly small
Google has how many employees to process these requests now? Somehow, these numbers look annoyingly huge.
How much does this cost Google to process? How much more does this cost to resist if Google wants to try to protect its customers' data, how much more to research whether each particular customers deserves this effort?
Can Google bill the governments for this service? Does this qualify as a fifth-amendment "taking"? Ca
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To cross my streams (original Ghostbusters analogy) to another story on slashdot that I won't link to: Looks like a perfect opportunity to me for increasing the number of women employed by Google.
Yet (Score:4, Interesting)
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Monitoring campaigners and journalists who actually want to stop terrorism?
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Not stopping terrorism because
a) That is actually hard to do and mass-surveillance does not help one bit.
b) Terrorism is pushing a _lot_ of money and power towards law enforcement. Like any bureaucracy they want this to continue and increase even more.
The whole thing about mass-surveillance stopping terrorism is a "Big Lie" and people are falling for it just as always.
Incidentally, with all the data they collect, they can also get rid of people they do not like or stop political careers before they really
Re:Yet (Score:4, Insightful)
The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
First, these requests aren't warrantless. The numbers Google reports are a combination of various types of legal process requests, including warrants, subpoenas, court orders, national security letters, wiretaps, pen registers, trap and trace orders and various kinds of requests from foreign countries (often through the US legal system, but sometimes directly). Google generally doesn't provide any information without legal process, though it makes exceptions for certain kinds of emergency requests from law enforcement (see https://www.google.com/transpa... [google.com]).
Second, given there are a lot of different kinds of requests, they're for a lot of different things. Subpoenas are usually used to gather information to support a lawsuit. Court orders and warrants are usually used in criminal investigations. National security letters are used for terrorism and similar investigations. Wiretaps, pen registers and trap and trace orders are used in criminal and terrorism investigations.
Though we know that the government is doing a lot of spying that many of us (including me) find highly objectionable, it's not the case that all, or probably more than a tiny fraction, of the requests Google receives fall into that category. It's no surprise that the numbers are rising, either. As more of our communications and data storage moves online, more of what attorneys working on civil suits and criminal investigators looking for evidence needed to prosecute a crime is going to be found online. As one of the biggest repositories of that sort of data, Google is an obvious target to be served with lots of legal process papers.
Thank you (Score:2)
Thank you for being one of the very few sensible participants in this discussion.
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The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
They don't seem clueless. Here, from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... [bbc.com]
How Britain has been kept safe for a decade
Since the London bombings of a decade ago, Britain has managed to avoid such a mass attack. But statistics show it has been a close-run thing. Forty terrorist plots have been disrupted since 2005 - including seven in the past 18 months.
It's no accident that this country has not yet endured a Paris, Brussels or Nice. Britain's defences against terrorist attack depend not just on the watery buffer of the English Channel and our non-membership of Schengen - Europe's border-free area. Crucially they also rely on the way in which intelligence is now intimately shared between all the agencies: the Security Service (MI5), MI6, GCHQ - and the police. This is the key to keeping Britain safe - although it's by no means guaranteed.
But effective intelligence-sharing in the UK didn't happen overnight - as the history of combating Irish and Islamist terrorism shows. In many years of covering the conflict in Northern Ireland, I lost count of the number of times I was assured that intelligence-sharing had never been closer and the IRA was on the run. Both were fictions.
All that has dramatically changed. The Security Service and local counter-terrorism police officers now work closely together and share all intelligence. The barriers are down. MI5's door is open. This shared intelligence is then passed upwards to the pinnacle of Britain's counter-terrorist pyramid where it's sifted and analysed by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police at their weekly meetings in MI5's London headquarters. A further benefit of shared intelligence is that the agencies and police - both at home and abroad - now all work from a single list of targets - the contents and length of which are a closely guarded national secret.
These are the hard-learned lessons that have kept Britain relatively safe for the past decade. But, as the intelligence services and the police here are at pains to point out, there is no guarantee that it will always be so.
Now this BBC news story looks like it came directly out of a PR spokesperson from the intelligence agencies, so I don't know how much of it is true. But I wouldn't automatically assume it's all false.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance.
I certainly agree with that. However, I can't really see that it has anything to do with the story. Requests for data about 80K users out of, what, 2B? That's 0.004%, which is a very myopic panopticon. The US rate is a bit higher, 27K users out of, say, 150M (I'm just assuming that half of the US population has a Google account of some sort) is 0.02%, but that actually doesn't seem too excessive for supporting normal civil and criminal legal processes in a world where most people have significant electronic
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A per case count request can hide huge amounts of data been collected on many people over a few years.
Other nations could count each ip, email, call as data accessed and as a request for data.
Using such per case reporting methods a "democracy" can get its vast court ready
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Other methods, NSL can sway any data reporting. What Country Monitors Communications the Most: U.S., U.K., Canada, or Australia? (July 18 2012)
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut... [slate.com]
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The East European police forces and counter surveillance teams in the 1970-80's faced interesting issues and demands.
If they uncovered a plot by CIA, MI6 and other US funded pro democracy NGO's, more would have been expected from them again by their own govs and the Soviet Union.
Better just to keep looking at
Comrades (Score:2)
Signed,
Your Leader
Don't guess (Score:5, Insightful)
The big issues of the day are China and the South Sea.
These police deaths, as horrifying as they are to see, are well within the statistical normal. 2 Ambushes don't make a major trend and ambushing cops is not entirely new.
Being a police is a mildy dangerous job. It does not rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America because MOST criminals don't actually shoot back at all. Only 42 officers died last year being shot.
I suspect suicide actually killed more than criminals. This is because as the Dallas Chief suggesting, we are 'Asking our cops to do too much'.
We are asking them to go out into the public under the false pretense than their job is WAY more dangerous and construction work, when it's just not. It's not more dangerous than being a Cabi or deliver truck driver. Being on the road all the time is more dangerous than being a police officer.
That's not by accident, police do have a lot of protection and ppl are scared of them, but police death stats go back a long time and I suspect they are accurate enough. We have stats on all professions, especially death stats because you know people tend to notice when someone dies and why they died. With just that data we can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that being a police officer is not in the top 10 most dangerous professions. I don't know where it ranks.
140 dead out of 1.1 million makes me suspect it ranks quite low in lethal professions. Police also get a ton more benefits than other professions. They have special funds, added support from the public if they die in the line of duty, they get lots of free stuff.
Why are police getting all these perks and acting like their profession is so dangerous when in reality they are getting paid quite well for a less dangerous position and perks that other comparable non education required careers don't tend to offer. On top of that they are given special privileges by the law to protect them from investigation as well as Police Unions. They have proportionally way more charities also.
We are treating police more than nice enough. It's they who are not treating the people, their customers, well. Police training sucks, the Police Union needs to shut it's mouth and listen to the public. 1.1 million workers don't get to tell 332 million citizens how things should be. Police are our public employees. They are going to do the job within the bounds of what citizens say or citizens will get mad and eventually over decades of built up anger or just some bad mental health luck, you have events like this.
When police deaths double from 140 to 280 we can call it a major uptick, but even then. We are talking about 240 people out of 1.1 million. It's not worth national attention and it doesn't represent any real danger or crisis.
The real crisis is the way Americans mindlessly react to things on the media, without double checking, without thinking first, withing considering the repercussions. We are not going to hold the position of the worlds most powerful nation for much longer like this. When words come out of your mouth and you state them as fact, you outta know if they are true. It's not asking too much.
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As long as they don't wear red jackets and call themselves an army it's perfectly constitutional.
Any Data Collection can be accessed (Score:2)
By FAR the easiest SIGINT on a subject in a first world country will be via telemetry they're sending from their smartphone and computers, either consciously, not-really-thinking-about-it consciously, or via a hack.
It's safe to say that Google and Apple (smartphones/browsers) and Facebook (link tracking that's not done via Ad Words) have more raw data collection ability than the NSA natively does. That makes it trivial to tap into that feed as needed... But that's because anything the government *can* do th