Thousands Of NSA Requests Revealed As Ban Is Lifted On Tech Companies

Many tech companies have been fighting to reveal how many requests they’ve had from the NSA and similar surveillance groups around the world in a bid to win back some confidence from their customers. A ban was put into place to prevent companies such as Google and many other internet based companies from disclosing how often they received requests from the NSA and PRISM, which was uncovered last year by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Last week, the ban ended and a lawsuit with many tech companies vs the U.S. Government was settled. The result is that now companies such as Google can list NSA letters in its Transparency Report, a semi-annual publication that shows how often information is collected about internet users by governments.

Google have already published their numbers, showing that thousands of accounts such as Gmail and Blogger have been requested, and this doesn’t just stop at account information such as IP addresses and email addresses, but actual content and emails too.

Following Google, we see that Facebook shows a similar trend of thousands of accounts being accessed.

Many other sites will be publishing their numbers, and it will be interesting to see where the dust settles on this one and how many user details have been requested or which sites were the most requested, although we suspect Facebook, Google and Microsoft were the most targeted.

Thank you Gigaom for providing us with this information

Images courtesy of Gigaom.