Companies drop government lawsuit over disclosure of classified information, Apple reveals its involvement in a letter
Article provided by Barry K. Rothman.
Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft have been given the go-ahead in disclosing the details on orders and the data requests that they have received from the Foreign Intelligence Court.
This has come after these companies have sued the government for the right to declassify these numbers to the public.
In a statement released through Wall Street, both the Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, stated, “Through these new reporting methods, communications providers will be permitted to disclose more information than ever before to their customers. The office of the Director of National Intelligence…has determined that the public interest in disclosing this information now outweighs the national security concerns that required its classification.”
And so, with this ability to disclose information that was previously considered classified, the companies have agreed to drop their lawsuits as well.
And recently, Apple has already published a letter describing its relationship with the government as well as detailing the National Security Orders for data (249 in all) it has received from the government.
Apart from this, 927 law enforcement account requests for 2330 accounts and out of which it disclosed data on 747 accounts and objected to doing so 102 times.
Also, it did not reveal data on 254 specific accounts but did provide non-content data from 601 accounts. However, it did reveal data from 71 accounts with the percentage of data requests where they did disclose a certain amount was about 81%.
About the Author:
Barry K. Rothman is an attorney from Los Angeles specializing in Business and Entertainment Law. He has represented many celebrities from Hollywood. Make sure to also visit Barry K. Rothman Reviews to read some of his client reviews.
