Why Did Google Miss a Lot of Users Affected by FISA?

Source: www.emptywheel.net --- Saturday, September 30, 2017
There’s been some bad news in the transparency reports issued by America’s tech companies thus far. First, Apple revealed a huge spike in FISA requests. the number of national security orders, including secret rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, spiked during the period. The company received between 13,250 and 13,499 national security orders, affecting between 9,000 and 9,249 accounts. That’s a threefold increase compared to the year earlier, which saw up to 2,999 orders for the period. It’s the largest number of national security orders that Apple has ever reported in five years of publishing transparency reports. My guess is this reflects increasing reliance on requests to Apple to obtain information that would otherwise be encrypted (it might even suggest Apple was forced to put a back door into their phones, though there has been no declassified FISC opinion that would reflect that, so I doubt that’s it). I’m wondering, because of the change Apple just made in iOS 11 that requires passwords before a phone trusts a computer, whether Apple has been asked to turn over backups of iPhones shared to iTunes, but that’s admittedly a wildarseguess. Then, in addition to an new high in standard government information requests, Google also revised its previously issued national security request numbers to reflect (on the most part) significantly more users and/or accounts affected (CNet reported this here ). At fir ...

from Apple http://ift.tt/2x5pe4B