Following the lead of Microsoft and Facebook, on Monday, Apple Inc. revealed how much data on its customers the United States Government has requested in recent months. Apple is one of the many tech companies that have been named as cooperating with the government in the NSA Internet surveillance program, called PRISM.
Apple said that between Dec. 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement officials for data relating to its customers. Overall, the requests encompassed between 9,000 and 10,000 user accounts or devices. Apple's statement, like Facebook's disclosure, said that the government requests for data included national security requests, criminal investigations, and requests from local authorities. Apple said that most requests came in the form of police crime investigations, searching for children or seniors with Alzheimer's, or trying to prevent a suicide.
Like Facebook's disclosure, there's little information about how many requests, exactly, were from the NSA, or other national security officials, looking for data on Apple's customers. Apple also spoke to allegations that it was one of the companies to give the government "direct access" to its servers, part of the Edward Snowden NSA PRISM revelations.
"Two weeks ago, when technology companies were accused of indiscriminately sharing customer data with government agencies, Apple issued a clear response: We first heard of the government's 'Prism' program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order."
Apple said that in every circumstance, its Legal department conducts a full evaluation of each request and will only hand over data if it's lawful and appropriate. When Apple does, the company said it "retrieve[s] and deliver[s] the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities," according to Apple's statement. The company also said that it refuses to fulfill government requests for data on customers "from time to time," when Apple sees inconsistencies or inaccuracies.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Facebook provided a percentage of how many requests it actually complies with, while Apple is more vague on the subject. Facebook said it complied with government requests for data 79 percent of the time.
Apple may be inexact when describing how often they fulfill requests from U.S. government officials and agencies for data on their customers, but they are clear about certain types of data which they will not, and cannot, provide to the government, or anyone. According to Apple's statement, the company has certain categories of information that it chooses not to retain. The company said that, for example, conversations on iMessage and FaceTime are protected by encryption on both ends of the conversation, meaning that both the sender and receiver can see or hear the messages, but Apple has no way of decrypting the data itself. The consumer computer giant added that location-based data found in Map searches and Siri requests are similarly inaccessible because they're not stored.
Apple's disclosure comes after Facebook released a statement Friday saying that the government — local, state, and federal — requested data on about 19,000 Facebook user accounts over the last six months of 2012. Facebook says it "aggressively protect[s] users' data when confronted with such requests," and that the site "frequently reject[s] such request[s] outright, or require[s] the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give[s] the government much less data than it has requested."
Apple is the latest tech company to disclose some information about government requests for data, after the National Security Agency's classified PRISM data-collection program was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Guardian and Washington Post on June 6, 2013. Documents listed several technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Apple, as participants in the program.
Speaking to participants in an online question and answer session at the Guardian's website Monday, NSA leaker Edward Snowden weighed in on tech companies' denials of involvement with the NSA's PRISM program. "Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies," he said.
Snowden also added, "As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we're finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception."