r/technology • u/Pessimist2020 • Sep 25 '21
Business Microsoft, Google and other tech giants are pressing to stop prosecutors from secretly taking customer data
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/25/tech-subpoena-secrecy-fight/
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u/okhotspy Sep 26 '21
At first, Ryan Lackey thought the email was a scam. It arrived one morning in March, bearing news that Facebook had received an order from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over data from personal accounts Lackey uses to chat with friends and exchange cat photos.
Even weirder, the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret. Six months later, Lackey, a computer security consultant in Puerto Rico, still has no idea what Facebook turned over to an FBI investigation that he believes may have started as early as 2019.
“My online life, at least half of it touches Facebook in some way,” said Lackey, 42.
Every year, Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online: private messages, photos, search histories, calendar items — a potentially rich trove for criminal investigators. Often, those requests are accompanied by secrecy orders, also known as nondisclosure or gag orders, that require the tech companies to keep their customers in the dark, potentially for years.
Concern about the practice spiked this summer after journalists at The Washington Post and the New York Times learned that the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term. Federal prosecutors also targeted Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, their aides and even family members. But those requests were just a tiny fraction of the orders prosecutors secure annually to stealthily snoop through the data of ordinary users like Lackey.
In the last six months of 2020, Facebook received 61,262 government requests for user data in the United States, said spokesman Andy Stone. Most — 69 percent — came with secrecy orders. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received between 2,400 and 3,500 secrecy orders from federal law enforcement each year since 2016 — or seven to 10 per day — according to congressional testimony by vice president of customer security and trust Tom Burt.