As the NSA spying scandal unravels, tech companies are doing their best to retain the trust of their users. Google has now come forward to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to relax the gag orders given to the company about revealing exactly what type of information the government has requested from them. The Mountain View based company is citing the First Amendment for rights to speak about the information it has been forced to give to the government.
Last week, Google’s Larry Page wrote a blog post attempting to debunk the rumor that they have joined PRISM but the company wants to go further to reveal the total numbers of requests it receives from the government. “Greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately,” says Google in a statement issued today.
Yahoo! is also urging the FICA to allow the company to reveal specific numbers about government data requests. In 2008, Yahoo! tried and failed to challenge a government court order requesting information about foreign users, citing its unconstitutionality.
Check out Google’s full court filing below:
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – Motion for Declaratory Judgment
[Source: The Washington Post, Google]
