CREDO Mobile, a small California cellphone carrier with around 125,000 subscribers, became the first U.S. telephone company to release a transparency report on Thursday, ahead of AT&T, and Verizon, which have promised they'd publish their own at the end of last month.
After the first revelations of secret National Security Agency surveillance programs stared coming out at the beginning of the summer of 2013, Internet giants began to deny their involvement, and push for more transparency. Some companies, like Facebook, Apple and Yahoo, published their first transparency reports.
Verizon, AT&T and other telecom companies, reportedly hand in all their customers' phone records to the NSA. But the companies remained practically silent for six months, except for when they answered a series of questions posed by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
Their answers revealed that they had received 1.1 million data requests in 2012. No data about 2013 was released.
Then, on Dec. 19, Verizon announced it would soon publish data on the government requests it had received. And AT&T followed Verizon's lead the next day.
But Verizon and AT&T have still to fulfill their promises. CREDO Mobile, which bills itself as a "business that works for progressive social change," stole their thunder on Thursday.
"CREDO has a decades-long record fighting for the civil liberties, not just of our phone customers, but of all Americans,” Michael Kieschnick, CEO of CREDO, said in a press release. "Despite the shocking revelations of NSA abuses, the U.S. government continues to defend unconstitutional programs to systematically spy on Americans. So it’s up to companies like ours to lift the curtain to the extent allowed by law and fight for our customers’ constitutional rights."
CREDO's transparency report isn't that revealing: in 2013 the company only received a grand total of 16 data requests from federal, state, and local authorities. But it's still a first for a U.S. telephone or cellphone company.
In the report, the company reveals it answered 14 of those requests, but none involved the content of its customers' communications. Interestingly, CREDO also has a detailed break down of each requests, listing the agency that issued it, and even precisely what kind of request it was — whether it was an administrative subpoena, a grand jury subpoena, or an emergency request, for example.
Just like what Internet giants did in their own reports, CREDO also denounced the gag order it is subjected to when it comes to data requests related to national security issues, including those coming from the NSA or the FBI through the controversial National Security Letters.
"It may not be possible for CREDO or any telecom carrier to release to the public a full transparency report," the company wrote on its site. "As the USA PATRIOT Act and other statutes give law enforcement the ability to prevent companies from disclosing whether or not they have received certain orders."
Source: Mashable.com
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