Tech giants reach White House deal on NSA surveillance of customer data
The Obama administration has reached a deal with a number of technology giants, allowing the companies to disclose more information on customer data they are compelled to share with the government.
Announced on Monday, the transparency arrangement ends months of legal wrangling between the companies and US intelligence agencies before a secret surveillance court, to compel the disclosures.
The disclosures are to be nonspecific, listed by the thousand and subject in some cases to a six-month delay – speaking to the large quantities of data that the government still plans on collecting from its technology partners. In order to be more specific about the amount of data turned over, the companies must be less specific about the type of data it is.
As with most such announcements, the devil is in the details.
Every six months, companies can now publish reports listing how many thousand National Security Letters, a form of nonjudicial subpoena from the FBI, they receive, as well as how many customer accounts those letters affect, also listed by the thousand.
If they are going to be rounded to the thousands, that would seem to indicate that a lot of people are being affected by government surveillance. You'd think that they would have more terrorists to show for their efforts. The major concern of the tech companies is the impact that the recent disclosures have had on the willingness of people to do business with them. It doesn't look like this arrangement will provide much help along those lines.