People share statuses, repost photos and tweet life’s most intimate details. There are so many ways to broadcast personal business but what about the secrets passed around online. Are they safe from prying eyes? The opportunity to keep things “just between friends” on the internet is practically extinct. Privacy settings can be circumvented by the technically savvy, especially when it comes to the government.
Even the sacred space of e-mail offers no sanctuary of private messaging when enquiring minds want to investigate the details of personal conversations. Just ask David Petraeus, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who recently resigned after the FBI uncovered unsent e-mails in a draft folder that revealed his involvement in an extramarital affair.
That was the head of the CIA! It’s hard to imagine what kind of snooping the government can do when it comes to plain-old-private-citizens. Google attempts to alleviate a little bit of that guess work with their biannual Transparency Report which tracks different governments’ requests to access users’ files and remove content. Google states, “As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.”
It sounds like the plot of a cheesy spy movie but basically it all boils down to the data Google has that governments around the world want, particularly information that pertains to criminal investigations. Google’s senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou wrote in a blog post, “This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise.”
According to Chou, in the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world requesting information about 34,614 accounts. The U.S. made 7,969 of those requests on about 16,281 accounts - a 26 percent increase from the prior period. Google complied with 90% of the requests.
RedOrbit broke down some of the stats about the inquiries Google received and the action they took:
- 5 requests were made to remove 7 YouTube videos critical of public officials, but Google declined them all.
- 1 court order was received to remove 1,754 posts from Google Groups involving a case of continuous defamation against a man and his family. 1,664 of those posts were removed.
- 3 court orders came in pertaining to 641 search results that linked to purportedly defamatory websites to which Google removed 233 search results.
- 156 search results for trademark violations were removed.
Although many of the requests Google receives are legitimate and stop threatening behavior or the spread of slanderous information, sometimes that’s not the case. CNN’s Heather Kelly points out, “Outdated laws have created loopholes that allow government and law enforcement agencies to request information and conduct electronic surveillance without warrants. The piece of legislation at the heart of the issue is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986. Technology has changed radically in the past 25 years. E-mails, cellphones, location information and data stored on cloud services weren't considered when the original law was drafted.”
Many lawmakers are calling for the ECPA to be updated but until that happens it’s important that internet users understand the way the current laws work and how the government is using it to moderate the information broadcast online and discover the secrets some people are trying to bury.
Image compliments of imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.
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