As far as the national security-related requests are concerned, this year Apple has received four times the amount in the first half of the year that it did one year ago. In the first half of 2017, from January 1 all the way to June 30, Apple received anywhere from 13,250 to 13,499 national security requests from the U.S. government. These requests had an affect on 9,000 to 9,249 people who use Apple’s devices.
“There’s not a huge track record here, but you can start to make a simple graph. The trend does seem to be upward,” Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said. The amount of government requests made to tech companies has been steadily growing since 2014. This is when the data first started to become available.
It’s not exactly made clear why Apple has seen such an increase in national security requests from the government this year.
Companies like Facebook, Yahoo or Microsoft have yet to voluntarily report their figures for this year. Google has said that they had received anywhere from 0 to 499 National Security Letters requesting data on between 1,000 and 1,499 user accounts in the first six months of 2017, more than ever before. Google is usually the go-to company when the government wants to collect data on people.
Google is also campaigning for reform under the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
“Providing a pathway for such countries to obtain electronic evidence directly from service providers in other jurisdictions will remove incentives for the unilateral, extraterritorial assertion of a country’s laws, data localization proposals, aggressive expansion of government access authorities, and dangerous investigative techniques,” wrote Richard Salgado, Google’s director of Law Enforcement and Information Security.
