Companies like Apple have been eager for the government to grant them permission to reveal information on how they handle government requests for information. This, after The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers revealed Prism, the high security government program that eavesdrops on our internet information. The program culls records from all sorts of sources. Apple has meanwhile revealed that it received 4,000 to 5,000 requests by U.S. law enforcement for customer data for the six months that ended last May.
More specifically, Apple says 9,000 to 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in requests for information from federal, state, and local authorities, as reported by the Washington Post. Most of these requests were to aid police in investigating crimes such as robberies, and also missing children cases, suicide prevention, and so forth.
Facebook, meanwhile, claims it has received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from the government over the same six months, targeting 19,000 users.
The idea of a benevolent higher power watching over us for our own good sounds almost theological, and some might even say that so long as the government truly is just, it should snoop as much as it wants (“What does an innocent person have to hide?”). But even assuming the government wouldn’t abuse their power – and we have no indication we should ever assume this – the right to privacy is worth fighting for anyway.