Google tells SA government to stuff off

Google recently updated its Transparency Report for the tenth time, detailing the number of government demands it received for user information in criminal investigations during the first half of 2014.

The update also covers demands for user information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and through National Security Letters (NSLs).

“Worldwide, the numbers continue to rise,” said Richard Salgado, legal director, law enforcement and information security at Google.

“Excluding FISA and NSL demands, we’ve seen a 15% increase since the second half of last year, and a 150% jump since we first began publishing this data in 2009,” said Salgado.

South African requests

Google said that it regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data.

According to Google’s latest transparency report, it received 7 requests from South Africa for user data.

Google explains that “we review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law, and we may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases”.

What is telling is that Google did not provide information in any of these requests. It basically told whoever asked for the information to get lost.

Google also said in a previous report that it received a request from South Africa’s Counter Intelligence Agency to remove a blog post that allegedly infringed copyright by criticizing a media release that the agency had issued. “We did not remove the blog post,” said Google.

The following table provides an overview of the South African user data requests over the last year.

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