Blogzilla: Government requests for Internet and phone records

Friday, April 23, 2010

Government requests for Internet and phone records

Google has (rightly) won praise for its new tool showing the number of requests it has received from governments to remove web pages and get user information. Here is some more specific data on European government demands for user data from telecommunications companies during 2008, gleaned from a recently-leaked European Commission review of the Data Retention Directive:

Government requests for communications data per million population (2008)

Government requests for communications data per million population

Country	Requests	Population (m)	Requests/m population
Cyprus	34	0.761	45
Czech Republic	131560	10.323	12,744
Germany	13348	82.12	163
Denmark	3605	5.447	662
Estonia	4490	1.343	3,343
Greece	584	11.172	52
Finland	4010	5.27	761
France	538437	62.277	8,646
Ireland	14095	4.422	3,187
Latvia	16862	2.271	7,425
Malta	867	0.413	2,099
Slovenia	282	2.013	140
UK	470222	61.073	7,699

Notes: 2008 population figures from IMF World Economic Outlook. Spain and Lithuania gave non-comparable figures to European Commission.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: spying fuckers; 1:45 pm
Ian Brown said...: A German colleague writes: The German figure encompasses only cases where traffic data not stored for billing purposes (thus retained exclusively under directive 2006/24/EC) was handed over to an authority. The figure does not include the handing over of traffic data used for billing and of subscriber data (e.g. name, address, telephone number), whether it was filtered out using traffic data (e.g. authority provides IP address and time of access) or subscriber data (e.g. authority provides telephone number). Subscriber data was requested more than 4 million times in Germany last year (LEAs have on-line access to the providers subscriber databases).

The UK figure, as I understand it, encompasses all access to communications data, i.e. all of the above.; 10:22 pm