Twitter’s latest transparency report says that government surveillance requests for its data — particularly from the U.S. government — has skyrocketed since July.
“We saw an overall increase of 40 percent in government requests for Twitter user account information since our last report. While requests have increased in many countries, Russia, Turkey, and the United States stand out from the rest,” Jeremy Kessel, a Twitter senior manager, said Monday.
Mr. Kessel added that Russia went from never requesting any data from the San Francisco-based company to 100 requests in the same period.
“We saw a 29 percent increase in requests from the United States, while our compliance rate increased 8 percent,” Mr. Kessel said.
The technology website Ars Technica reported Monday that Twitter’s claim falls in line with a trend by governments for more user information from tech companies.
“Twitter said that during the second half of 2014, it received 2,871 global requests for data on as many as 7,144 Twitter users. It said it fulfilled about 52 percent of the demands. The U.S. government ranked first in requests, at 1,622,” Ars Technica reported.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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