Dropbox Joins Cloud Giants Calling For NSA Transparency
Dropbox says it needs to show detailed figures on national security requests if it is to be transparent
Cloud storage supplier Dropbox has joined Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook in petitioning a US court to let it open up about certain kinds of user data requests it receives, which are then fed to the National Security Agency (NSA).
Dropbox said it had issues with the way in which it was currently allowed to reveal details of requests from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which has attracted plenty of attention following the damaging leaks of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Dropbox: We want to be transparent
“Dropbox has an interest in these motions because the government has told Dropbox that it isn’t allowed to publish exactly how many national-security requests, if any, it receives,” the company’s submission to the court read.
“Instead, the government will permit Dropbox to provide information about national-security requests only if those requests are lumped together with regular law-enforcement requests and, even then, only in bands of 1,000.
“Because Dropbox received fewer than 100 regular law-enforcement requests last year, reporting in the government’s format would decrease Dropbox’s ongoing transparency efforts.”
Like all of those petitioning for greater transparency, Dropbox releases a report on the user data requests it gets, but little detail is provided.
Its latest figures covering the entirety of 2012, showed it received 87 requests, not including national security requests, from the US government. It received less than 20 for non-US governments.
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