Apple has jumped into the thick of the legal fight over transparency surrounding technology giants’ sharing of customer data with the National Security Agency.
In a surprisingly caustic filing to the secretive court overseeing government surveillance, Apple argued that the US government ought to lift the gag order preventing it from informing customers about even basic information concerning data-sharing with the NSA and other agencies.
Apple joined Yahoo, Microsoft, LinkedIn and other tech firms in arguing for greater leeway to explain its co-operation with the US intelligence community just as it released its first-ever report on how it complies with data requests from world governments.
In the report, Apple said generically it received “0-1,000” data requests from US law enforcement – and listed the same broad number of compliances, rejections and modifications. Under the gag order, Apple said it could not specify how many of those were routine requests by police and how many came from intelligence agencies.
Apple complained to the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court that the gag order had compelled it into an absurd position.
“From Apple’s perspective, as well as the perspective of its customers and the public as a whole, this limited disclosure does not contribute effectively to the debate over the government’s national security systems and… is unnecessary to protect national security,” Apple argued to the court.
“By design, it combines the aggregate data that are of the greatest and most timely public concern, and the greatest concern to Apple and its customers, with other unrelated aggregated data in a deliberate attempt to reduce public knowledge as to the activities of the government.”
The suit before the Fisa court would not substantively impact the NSA’s ability to demand and receive data from its technology and telecommunications partners. It arose after Yahoo and other firms sought to refute reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post they argue erroneously characterized the firms as allowing the NSA to access their data servers directly under its Prism program.
Yahoo has been aggressive in arguing before the Fisa court that it ought to be able to demonstrate that it sought, unsuccessfully, to resist a 2007 surveillance request.
Apple has not apparently gone that far; it does not indicate in its filing that it fought surveillance data requests. The company leans heavily on the argument that the government lacks the authority to prevent Apple from disclosing more specific information about those data requests.
“The government has failed to identify anything in Fisa (the subject of the court’s jurisdiction) that prohibits the disclosure of the aggregate number of Fisa process received and accounts affected by individual national security authority,” the company argues, using the acronym for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a central legal wellspring for much of America's foreign signals intelligence collection.
