Revised rules let Apple update law enforcement, national security data

Having perhaps fended off doom-and-gloom over its financials, Apple is now also confronting the doom-and-gloom over federal surveillance. The company on Monday updated the information it provided last November on U.S. law enforcement and national security requests for user data.

For once, these changes are actually good news: The government has revised its rules on how much information Apple can publish about the requests it receives, allowing the company to be more specific. Whereas Apple’s previous report only listed ranges of 1000 for law enforcement requests, the company can now spell out exactly how many they received.

All told, between January 1, 2013 and June 30, 2013, Apple received 927 accounts requests from law enforcement, covering 2330 accounts. (The former number is slightly lower than the original number provided by Apple, which it said was between 1000 and 2000.) Data was disclosed for 747 of those accounts, and Apple objected in 102 cases; 254 requests were met with no data disclosure. In 601 requests, non-content data—such as subscriber information—was disclosed and in just 71 requests, some of the content of a user’s account was disclosed. In 81 percent of requests some kind of data was disclosed.

In the case of national security orders—which include National Security Letters (NSL) and requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—the rules were also relaxed, though not as much as in law enforcement. Rather than ranges of 1000, the number of NSLs may now be disclosed in groups of 250. In total, Apple received between 0 and 249 national security orders, covering between 0 and 249 accounts. As the company points out, the number of total accounts involved in national security orders is “infinitesimal” given the hundreds of millions of Apple accounts overall.

Apple also clarified that it received no orders for bulk data, and that the national security requests include every U.S. order, regardless of where in the world the customer is located.

The company has not yet provided information on how many requests it has received from account data for the latter half of 2013, but it emphasized once again its commitment to transparency.

“We believe strongly that our customers have the right to understand how their personal information is being handled,” the report reads, “and we are pleased the government has developed new rules that allow us to more accurately report law enforcement orders and national security orders in the U.S.”