The U.S. government is increasingly turning to Google for assistance with its investigations.
Between January and June of this year, the search giant
received nearly 8,000 requests from the U.S. government for data about Gmail users, bloggers, people who store documents in the
cloud and other Google account holders. That includes
requests for the type of information that led to the
recent resignation of CIA
Director David Petraeus.
Google turned over the requested data 90%
of the time, the company says in its latest "transparency report,"
released on Tuesday. In the latter half of 2011, Google
received significantly less requests -- 6,321 -- and complied 93% of the
time.
Those figures -- along with the still-unfolding drama
engulfing Petraeus
-- could help revive an effort to update
federal privacy laws. The main law governing digital privacy, the 1986
Electronic Privacy Communications Act, is laughably outdated. Among
other questionable provisions, the EPCA only requires
government officials to obtain a search warrant to access emails that
are less than six months old. If emails are in storage for more than 180
days, they can be obtained without a search warrant.
That's important because the government can't get a search warrant
without probable cause to believe the search will uncover evidence of a
crime -- which isn't always an easy standard to meet.
As
Wiredreports,
when the law was passed, few if any people retained old emails --
mainly because they didn't
have the ability to do so. Therefore, it seemed reasonable at the time
to draw a distinction between current emails and older ones. But now
that people can retain
emails for years on end, ECPA's
framework no longer makes sense.
Google also reports that it
received court orders and other requests from government officials to
remove more than 2,500 pieces of content --including YouTube
clips, search results, Google Groups posts and search results -- in the
six months ending in December of 2011. The company says it didn't always
comply with those demands.
For
instance, Google says it received five requests and one court order to
take down seven YouTube clips "for criticizing local and state government agencies, law enforcement or public officials." The
company says it didn't remove content in response.
It's
not clear from the report how Google was able to defy a judicial order,
but it's possible that the company went to court
and got the order vacated. Google also says that it received three court
orders to remove 641 search results for linking to allegedly libelous
sites; the company says it removed
233 of the
results.