Verizon Releases Baseline Information on Government Requests for Subscriber Data
Verizon made good on a commitment it made last year to release an online report on the number of law enforcement requests for customer information the company received in 2013 in the U.S. and internationally (WID Dec 20 p2). But in an accompanying statement Wednesday, Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch acknowledged the information is limited by government controls. Verizon is the first telco to issue such a detailed report.
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"To date, the United States government has limited what we can report regarding requests in national security matters,” Milch said (http://vz.to/1inWMBA). “Like all other companies to issue transparency reports, at this point, we are not permitted ... to report information about FISA orders. We have obtained permission, however, to report -- within a range -- the number of National Security Letters we received in 2013. Last week, President [Barack] Obama announced that telecommunications providers will be permitted to make public more information in the future; we encourage greater transparency and, if permitted, will make those additional disclosures."
Verizon received between 1,000 and 2,000 National Security Letters in 2013, the report said (http://vz.to/1mGBJKL.
As a further baseline, Verizon said it received 164,000 subpoenas from law enforcement in the U.S. last year and 70,000 court orders requiring release of data. “Almost half of the general orders required us to release the same types of basic information that could also be released pursuant to a subpoena,” Verizon said. “We do not provide law enforcement any stored content (such as text messages or email) in response to a general order."
A small subset of the orders, 7,800, required Verizon to provide access to data in real time. “A pen register order requires us to provide law enforcement with real-time access to phone numbers as they are dialed, while a trap and trace order compels us to provide law enforcement with real-time access to the phone numbers from incoming calls,” Verizon said. Verizon also said it received about 1,500 wiretap orders last year.
Verizon also received about 36,000 warrants. “While many warrants seek the same types of information that can also be obtained through a general order or subpoena, most warrants we received in 2013 sought stored content or location information,” Verizon said. Verizon received some 35,000 demands for location data, with 24,000 of those through orders and about 11,000 through warrants. Verizon was also required to act last year on 3,200 warrants or court orders for “cell tower dumps, “ or information on all calls bounced off a tower within a specified period of time, it said.
Also last year, Verizon received 85,116 emergency requests for information from law enforcement in matters involving the danger of death or serious physical injury or from public safety answering points tied to 911 calls. “While in 2013 we did not track whether an emergency request was made by law enforcement or PSAPs, we are doing so now,” Verizon said. “We estimate that at least half of these requests -- approximately 50,000 -- were from law enforcement.” Five nations asked Verizon to block access to various websites, the carrier said. “In Colombia, we were required to block access to approximately 1,200 websites that the Colombian government believed contained child pornography. In Greece, we were required to block 424 sites related to online gambling. We were also required to block websites in Belgium (37) and Portugal (2) related to online gambling or copyright issues."
Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said in an interview the data released by Verizon is helpful to those concerned about surveillance and privacy. “Overall we're very pleased,” he said. “We hope it will set a standard for other telephone companies to issue reports in the future.” CDT was pleased that Verizon provided specific data on different types of information Verizon had to provide, but the group would like more information on the kind of “content” sought by the government, whether it’s text content or voicemail content, Laperruque said.
More detail on cell tower dumps would also be helpful, Laperruque said. “They mention how many requests for cell tower dumps they received but not exactly what the data is within that.” One surprise was a sharp uptick in emergency requests, which appear to be up 20,000 over 2012, based on data Verizon previously disclosed, he said.
"Verizon has done the right thing by releasing a transparency report so that we, as customers and citizens, can better evaluate what information our government seeks about us and how our service providers respond to those requests,” said Laura Moy, staff attorney at Public Knowledge. “But the report itself is disappointing. First, the report contains no information whatsoever about how often, if ever, Verizon rejected law enforcement demands because they were invalid or unlawful. Second, the report says nothing about private information that Verizon hands over voluntarily or sells to the government. It was revealed in November that AT&T has been selling customers’ call records to the CIA, and we'd like some assurance that Verizon hasn’t been doing the same.”