Twitter logs sharp rise in non-NSA government requests for data

Twitter says government requests for data are rising. Photograph: Alamy

Twitter is under increasing pressure from governments to release users' private information, with requests rising 40% in the first six months of the year, the microblogging company said on Wednesday in its twice-yearly transparency report.

The United States made three-quarters of the 1,157 data requests during the six-month period, the company's report said.

Governments usually want the emails or IP addresses tied to a Twitter account.

In one well-known case, a French court ordered Twitter in February to turn over information about an anonymous account that posted anti-Semitic tweets. Twitter, which had initially resisted by arguing that the data was stored beyond French jurisdiction in its California servers, ultimately complied in June.

Efforts to censor Twitter content also rose sharply, the company said.

"Over the last six months, we have gone from withholding content in two countries to withholding content [ranging from hate speech to defamation] in seven countries," said Twitter's legal policy manager, Jeremy Kessel.

Twitter was censored the most in Brazil, where courts issued orders on nine occasions to remove a total of 39 defamatory tweets.

Authorities in Japan, another large Twitter user base, made 87 requests for user information, while UK agencies filed 26. Most requests come in the form of court-issued subpoenas, Twitter said.

The report did not include secret information requests within the US authorised under the Patriot Act. US companies are prohibited from acknowledging the existence of data requests made under those statutes.

Transparency reports such as the one published by Twitter have been a contentious issue in the wake of the leaks by former security contractor Edward Snowden, who alleged that service providers including Google, Facebook and Microsoft systematically pass along huge troves of user data to the National Security Agency.

The companies, which have denied the scope of Snowden's allegations, have asked the US government for permission to reveal the precise number of national security requests they receive in order to publicly argue that their co-operation with the government has been relatively limited.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/01/twitter-rise-government-requests-data

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