Silicon Valley reveals scope of NSA requests

Several major Internet companies this week published the number of requests for user data they received from the National Security Agency, information they’d been previously barred from airing. Facebook said “a small fraction of 1 percent” of its user accounts were the subject of government data requests over a year, and Microsoft said that such requests affected between 15,000 and 15,999 accounts. The disclosure reflects a compromise the companies reached with the government last week, but a Google’s executive said still “more transparency is needed so everyone can better understand how surveillance laws work and decide whether or not they serve the public interest.”

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