Google's New Transparency Tool: A Window into Government Surveillance

We've known for a long time that electronic privacy law is woefully outdated. But what we haven't known is how often the government is taking advantage of this fact to engage in a shopping spree in the treasure trove of personal information being collected by companies like Google.

So, we're happy to see Google's just-released Government Requests tool, which is the company's attempt to shine some light on how often governments around the world request user information and content removal from Google.

Google's new tool displays the number of "user requests" that Google received from various governments from July to December 2009. According to the tool, the company received thousands of such requests from the U.S. government during that period —requests digging into the intimate details of individual lives that are captured in emails, search histories, reading and viewing logs, and the like.

There are a few shortcomings with Google's new tool. First, it tracks requests that are received as part of an official criminal investigation—which would exclude, for example, the infamous Department of Justice subpoena asking for millions of users' search queries, something that was not part of an official criminal investigation. Second, Google's tool only counts the number of requests it receives, not the number of user records that were requested—and a single request may seek to collect countless individual records.

Finally, Google is barred by law from disclosing the number of requests it receives pursuant to National Security Letters, although we know that upwards of 50,000 of these secret government requests are issued every year. All told, the requests that show up in Google's tool are just the tip of the iceberg.

The ACLU has been calling on Google and other corporations to disclose this kind of information for years. We hope this step will provide momentum for reforming the out-of-date Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Further, we hope that Google will continue to improve this tool to shine more light on how many non-criminal requests for user records it receives, break those down by type, provide more information on how many users were or would have been affected by those requests, and explore ways to disclose how it has responded to those requests—which is admittedly difficult to do.

https://secure.aclu.org/site/TellAFriend?m...