SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Automattic, the company behind content management and blogging platform WordPress, has complained that it can't reveal the full extent of state intelligence agencies' requests to probe users' accounts.
The company's new National Security report reports that the company's recorded zero “national security requests” in 2015's first six months. But the report then offers this observation:
The post goes on to say “By preventing us from sharing a more precise number of requests, the current disclosure rules diminish the trust that our users place in us and our services. For now, we are disclosing the maximum amount of information allowed by law.”
Automattic's unhappy with that so has joined the Twitter-initiated effort (PDF) to get the US attorney-general to change the rules in order to allow more detailed reporting of intelligence agency requests.
That effort could take years to resolve, so until it does it seems safest to assume that even though companies list small quantities of intelligence agency action, the reality may be rather different. ®
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pendorbound on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:38PM
I can't cite chapter & verse right now, but the regulations for reporting NSL's allow them to report in ranges, not specific numbers. The first range that they're allowed to report is from 0 to 1000. They're not actually allowed to say if it was zero or more than zero. The "By preventing us from sharing a more precise number..." bit was a clever lawyer's way of at least suggesting that they did in fact receive a number more than zero but less than 1000. The law prevents them from actually coming out & saying more than zero though. It could have been 999.
I'd be shocked if there wasn't a department of the various TLA's responsible for not going over 999 for any one company in a single reporting period.
+1 to WordPress for witty exploit of a legal loophole. -∞ to the Soviet^W US government for requiring this kind of doublespeak for reporting on the activities of "law enforcement".