An alliance of US technology companies – including the "big five" named in the NSA's Prism project – and civil liberties groups have written to President Barack Obama and the leaders of the US Senate and House of Representatives demanding to be allowed to publish data about secret demands for user data.
Mr. Gidari is a recognized expert on electronic surveillance law; and, long an advocate for greater transparency in government demands for user data, he brought the first public lawsuit before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, seeking the right of providers to disclose the volume of national security demands received.
Do government's demands for user data precede or follow protests and the like?
Among those of great ethical importance is the question of how SNS providers ought to respond to government demands for user data for investigative or counterterrorism purposes.
Yahoo's general counsel, Bell, later revealed that the company had resisted joining PRISM because it thought the government's demands for user data were "unconstitutional and overbroad".
"In our continued effort to increase transparency around government demands for user data, today we begin to make available to the public the National Security Letters (NSLs) we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations," Richard Salgado, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, wrote in a blog post.
Yahoo's general counsel, Bell, later revealed that the company had resisted joining PRISM because it thought the government's demands for user data were "unconstitutional and overbroad". However, Yahoo was threatened with $250,000-per-day fines if it did not comply, with that fine set to double each week until compliance began.
But amid the lighter banter, Colbert also tried to pin Karp down on a few more serious topics as well, including the inevitable questions about all that Tumblr porn, and more importantly, whether or not Tumblr, now owned by Yahoo, would have to cater to NSA demands for user data.
"In our continued effort to increase transparency around government demands for user data, today we begin to make available to the public the National Security Letters (NSLs) we have received where, either through litigation or legislation, we have been freed of nondisclosure obligations," Richard Salgado, Google's director of law enforcement and information security, wrote in a blog post.
The two pieces of legislation in question are S.1452, the Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013, and H.R. 3035, the Surveillance Order Reporting Act of 2013, "each of which would clarify that companies have the right to publish basic statistics about the government demands for user data that they receive".
