Josh Peterson reports:
Verizon updated its transparency report Monday to include orders issued by the nation’s spy court.
During the first six months of 2013, the nation’s spy court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, ordered Verizon between zero to 999 times to hand over content for 4,000 to 4,999 customer selectors.
During that same time, the court issued the company between zero to 999 “non-content” orders to hand over information affecting zero to 999 customer selectors.
Verizon notes in its report the government uses the term “selector” to refer to account identifiers, such as phone numbers.
Because several selectors belong to a single account, the company said, the number of selectors requested is “generally greater than” the number of accounts directly affected by the court order.
Read more on Reason. As others have pointed out, these numbers all a bit misleading since Verizon is turning over records under bulk records collection via FISC orders. So saying that there are less that “non-content” orders is pretty much bullshit, in my opinion. I don’t blame Verizon for that, but the government for not allowing them to be more transparent.
Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.