It’s time to reform government surveillance laws

Posted by Susan Molinari, VP Public Policy 

The revelations about government surveillance practices—both in the U.S. and globally—over the past eight months have sparked a serious and overdue debate about the nature and scope of existing laws and programs. Today, many organizations and companies are participating in “The Day We Fight Back,” a series of events and awareness campaigns highlighting the urgent need for surveillance reform around the world.

Google recognizes the very real threats that the U.S. and other countries face, but we strongly believe that government surveillance programs should operate under a legal framework that is rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight.

In December, along with other technology companies, we unveiled a set of government surveillance reform principles that address many of the recent concerns around government surveillance. In Congress, Representative Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Senator Leahy (D-Vt.) have introduced legislation—the USA Freedom Act—that would codify many of these principles. As they both noted when introducing this bill, government surveillance programs “have come at a high cost to Americans’ privacy rights, business interests and standing in the international community.”

The USA Freedom Act reflects some of the key recommendations made by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence Communications and Technologies as well as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. We support this legislation and we urge Congress to enact it into law.

But there’s more that can be done as we consider appropriate reforms to government surveillance laws. Congress should update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require governmental entities to obtain a warrant before they can compel online companies to disclose the content of users’ communications. Legislation introduced by Senators Leahy and Lee (R-Utah) in the Senate and Representatives Yoder (R-Kan.), Graves (R-Ga.), and Polis (D-Colo.) in the House would achieve that goal. More than 100 companies, trade associations, and consumer groups—and more than 100,000 Americans—have signed on to support this important update to ECPA, which no longer reflects users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.

We will continue to press Congress to adopt these important measures, which would represent significant progress in the broader effort to reform government surveillance laws. If you want to receive updates from us, please visit google.com/takeaction and sign up.

A petition for greater transparency

Posted by Richard Salgado, Director, Law Enforcement & Information Security and Pablo Chavez, Director, Public Policy and Government Affairs

Today we filed an amended petition [PDF] in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This petition mirrors the requests made to Congress and the President by our industry and civil liberties groups in a letter earlier this year. Namely, that Google be allowed to publish detailed statistics about the types (if any) of national security requests we receive under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including Section 702. Given the important public policy issues at stake, we have also asked the court to hold its hearing in open rather than behind closed doors. It’s time for more transparency.

In addition, along with a number of other companies and trade associations, we are also meeting the President’s Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies today. We’ll reiterate the same message there: that the levels of secrecy that have built up around national security requests undermine the basic freedoms that are at the heart of a democratic society.

Asking the U.S. government to allow Google to publish more national security request data

This morning we sent the following letter to the offices of the Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Read the full text below. -Ed. 

Dear Attorney General Holder and Director Mueller

Google has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users’ trust. For example, we offer encryption across our services; we have hired some of the best security engineers in the world; and we have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users’ data.

We have always made clear that we comply with valid legal requests. And last week, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that service providers have received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests.

Assertions in the press that our compliance with these requests gives the U.S. government unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue. However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation.

We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures—in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.

Google appreciates that you authorized the recent disclosure of general numbers for national security letters. There have been no adverse consequences arising from their publication, and in fact more companies are receiving your approval to do so as a result of Google’s initiative. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security.

We will be making this letter public and await your response.

David Drummond
Chief Legal Officer

Congress, now live on YouTube

Posted by

Robert Kyncl, Vice President, Global Head of Content Partnerships for YouTube

& Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations

Video plays a powerful role in bringing us closer together, especially when it connects people in real time. By transcending borders, empowering citizens, and increasing transparency, it’s one of the many ways technology allows democracy to thrive. Starting this week, all members of the U.S. Congress will have the opportunity to access enhanced features on their YouTube channels, including the ability to live stream video.

Live video is already allowing elected officials and their constituents to reach one another in innovative ways. Thousands tuned in to YouTube to watch the president’s State of the Union address and the corresponding Republican response this February. Engagement is growing across many types of platforms — Google+ Hangouts, for example, have sparked face-to-face conversations on topics ranging from gun control to the national economy and have allowed people on the other side of the world to share their stories at Congressional hearings.

If you’re a member of Congress and would like to know more, check out these Dear Colleague letters issued by the House and Senate. Whether it’s to share a look into your daily work, broadcast speeches and meetings, or showcase events in your state or district, we can’t wait to see how you connect with your constituents.

More transparency into government requests

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst

About two years ago, we launched our interactive Transparency Report. We started by disclosing data about government requests. Since then, we’ve been steadily adding new features, like graphs showing traffic patterns and disruptions to Google services from different countries. And just a couple weeks ago, we launched a new section showing the requests we get from copyright holders to remove search results.

The traffic and copyright sections of the Transparency Report are refreshed in near-real-time, but government request data is updated in six-month increments because it’s a people-driven, manual process. Today we’re releasing data showing government requests to remove blog posts or videos or hand over user information made from July to December 2011.

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data in 2010, we also added annotations with some of the more interesting stories behind the numbers. We noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.

This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. And just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.

In addition to releasing new data today, we’re also adding a feature update which makes it easier to see in aggregate across countries how many removals we performed in response to court orders, as opposed to other types of requests from government agencies. For the six months of data we’re releasing today, we complied with an average of 65% of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.

We’ve rounded up some additional interesting facts in the annotations section of the Transparency Report. We realize that the numbers we share can only provide a small window into what’s happening on the Web at large. But we do hope that by being transparent about these government requests, we can continue to contribute to the public debate about how government behaviors are shaping our Web.

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In Support of Legislative Transparency

Posted by Seth Webb, Senior Policy Manager

Google believes that policy-making should be grounded in sound analysis of data. We take this to heart -- it’s why we launch tools like the Transparency Report, which shows when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. Similarly, when governments are transparent with their legislative data, their citizens can be more active participants in the political process.

Last year, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives identified transparency as one of its top priorities, and since then it has taken several steps towards becoming more open. The House now streams and archives video of committee hearings, and it shares draft legislation for public consultation online.

As part of its ongoing effort to promote openness and transparency, the House of Representatives voted for an appropriations bill that directs a task force to examine and expedite the process of disclosing large amounts of legislative data to the public. Even before the bill was passed, Congressional leadership issued a statement on the importance of transparency and requested for the task force to begin its work immediately.

We believe the ability to download bulk legislative data in formats like XML on a regular basis provides tremendous benefits. Website and app developers can use such data to provide up-to-date information on bills. Researchers can use it to perform studies. And politically-curious citizens can use it to follow legislation moving its way through Congress.

We've seen positive transparency efforts throughout the U.S. government. The White House, for one, recently issued a Digital Government Strategy that called for data from offices in the executive branch to be made more easily accessible by application developers.

New information platforms make it easier for the American public to watch and participate in their government, which strengthens the political process as a whole. We applaud Congress for the work that it's done to promote openness and look forward to a future of increased legislative transparency.

Internet at Liberty 2012 Conference: Join the discussion

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director of Public Policy 

Next week, 300+ Internet activists, policy makers, academics and NGO leaders from more than 30 countries will gather in Washington, D.C. to discuss the future of free speech online. The event is called Internet at Liberty 2012, and we want you to join the discussion.

The future of free expression is uncertain. According to the Open Net Initiative, more than 620 million Internet users—31% of the world’s total Internet users—live in countries where there is substantial or pervasive filtering of online content. And when free expression is in jeopardy, so are reporters; as the Committee to Protect Journalists found, nearly half of all the writers, editors, and photojournalists imprisoned around the world are online journalists.

Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are the worst offenders, but democracies around the world are also questioning whether the Internet requires monitoring and supervision. 2012 is a crucial year. As governments are trying to draw the right lines, we are bringing the most challenging and important debates to you via Internet at Liberty 2012.

Join us on May 23 and May 24 by watching our livestream at YouTube.com/citizentube, and feel free to Tweet your questions and comments (@InternetLiberty). If you are in the DC area, consider joining us at the event live. You can register here. Space is limited, but this is a crucial issue and we want you to participate.

For more information, check out our detailed schedule of events.

Checking in with the Global Network Initiative

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy and Lewis Segall, Senior Ethics and Compliance Counsel

No matter who or what you are, opening up to outside scrutiny isn’t an easy or comfortable process. But that's what we agreed to do a few years ago when we helped found the Global Network Initiative (GNI), an amalgam of companies, human rights activists, socially responsible investors and academics formed in response to actions by governments that endanger free expression on the global Internet.

The objectives of GNI are both simple and incredibly complex: promote and support free expression and privacy online; subscribe to principles and follow guidelines supported by measures of transparency and accountability; and educate people and engage policymakers around the world in an effort to create a more open and free Internet.

In starting GNI, the founding companies — Google, Microsoft and Yahoo — agreed to bring in outside assessors to review how we were doing against GNI principles. Our agreement to conduct these assessments is an important part of the organization's credibility.

Now these first assessments are finished and the results have been released as part of GNI's annual report released yesterday. After reviewing them, the non-company members of GNI have told us that while we're by no means perfect, the assessments are credible and rigorous and demonstrate that companies are making progress — a concrete step in our efforts to build trust not only with our GNI partners but with all our users.

The activities of Google to promote free expression and privacy around the world extend well beyond GNI. However, being a part of this group is a compelling opportunity, since it brings together diverse stakeholders and provides a unique forum to address the risks to a free and open internet. Along with the GNI, we welcome other companies and groups to join this effort.

Advancing the free flow of information

Posted by Winter Casey, Senior Policy Analyst, Google

The global economy relies on the free flow of information more than ever before. Companies large and small can use the Internet to reach new markets, which contributes to economic growth, job creation, and increased trade around the world.

But as companies and individuals are transmitting more information online, some governments are seeking to impose limits on the free flow of information. More than 40 governments now block or restrict information and data available on the Internet.

Last year, we released a white paper demonstrating that governments which block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth. For example, when companies can’t confidentially and confidently transmit the files and information that are necessary to keep their business running, their ability to export goods and services is hurt. The thesis is simple: when countries support the free flow of information, they will see more economic growth.

That’s why we joined companies like Citi, Microsoft, IBM, GE and others to endorse a new set of principles endorsing the free flow of information across borders. The principles, written under the leadership of the National Foreign Trade Council, outline several priorities for the U.S. business community which will promote transparent, fair, and secure cross-border data flows.

Individuals and businesses will benefit from a more consistent and transparent framework for the treatment of cross-border flows of goods, services and information. We look forward to continued work with governments and industry to advance the free flow of information online.

A strong step for congressional openness and accountability

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team

(Cross-posted from the Google Public Sector Blog.)

Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor took another strong step towards an open and accountable Congress, calling for better access to House legislative data in a letter to the Clerk of the House:

“...Openness, once a proud tradition of the House, is again the new standard. At the start of the 112th Congress, the House adopted a Rules Package that identified electronic documents as a priority for the institution. Towards that end, we are asking all House stakeholders to work together on publicly releasing the House’s legislative data in machine-readable formats...Ultimately, legislative data is the property of the American public. It is our hope that these reforms will continue to rebuild the trust between Congress and the people we serve.”

Open, standard data formats are fundamental to helping engineers, entrepreneurs and citizens access and use legislative information. We applaud Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor for their continued leadership on transparency.

Across industries, we’ve seen how well organized information can improve operations and reduce spending. In the same way that barcodes made merchandise easier to track and supply chains more efficient, using standardized machine-readable formats will be a large step in improving transparency around lawmaking.

And one day, it will be as simple for citizens to understand and track a bill as School House Rock makes it look:

Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report

Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

When we introduced the Transparency Report last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we’re adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.

In this graph, for example, you’ll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:

Starting today, you won’t have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You’ll get a snapshot up front. We’ve also added annotations for historical anomalies that we’ve seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.

As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualize datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.

We’ll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.

Bringing greater transparency to the lawmaking process

Posted by Seth Webb, Senior Policy Manager

There’s a saying: “If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” As it turns out, a lot of legislative work today is done on paper and outdated templates, with data about the process hard or impossible to come by. This means that very few citizens are able to follow laws as they’re being made.

We think that more transparency in the legislative process would result in better laws, more engaged citizens, and a better understanding of how the system works.

Lucky for the public, the House of Representatives has passed a new rules package that will make available much more information about how laws are made – with bills, amendments, and messages between the chambers and the White House all publicly available in electronic format. Under the new rules, all bills will be posted online for 72 hours before a final vote, and the House will require all committees to webcast their hearings and markups.

The House is also lifting the ban on electronic gadgets on the House floor, and the House Oversight Committee will post all committee hearings on a new, fully searchable YouTube channel called House.Resource.Org.

We’ve been strong advocates for government transparency, so we’re excited to see the House adopt reforms that will give the public more real-time information about what Congress is up to.

Tools to visualize access to information

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we can’t serve our users effectively. That’s why we act every day to maximize free expression and access to information. To promote transparency around this flow of information, we’ve built an interactive online Transparency Report with tools that allow people to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked. We believe that this kind of transparency can be a deterrent to censorship.

Like all companies, Google’s services occasionally experience traffic disruptions. Our new traffic tracking tool helps us and others track whether these interruptions are related to mechanical outages or are government-induced. Each traffic graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country and service. Graphs are updated as data is collected, then normalized and scaled in units of 0 to 100. This new tool—which is global and includes China—will replace the Mainland China service availability chart, which showed product access for China alone. By showing outages, the traffic graphs visualize disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's a government blocking information or a cable being cut. For example, the graphs show that YouTube has been inaccessible in Iran since June 12, 2009, following the disputed presidential election.


In April we also created a website that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. Today we’re updating this interactive Government Requests map with data from the first six months of 2010. We’ve also updated our analysis of the trends we saw across the data over the past six months. The new data for 2010 now includes the number of individual items asked to be removed, per country (for example, there may be many URLs per a single request.) You can learn more about trends in the data here. We view this as a concrete step that, we hope, will encourage both companies and governments to be similarly transparent.

Free expression is one of our core values. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. Free expression is, of course, also at the heart of Google’s business. Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information across the globe. We hope this step toward greater transparency—and these tools—will help in ongoing discussions about the free flow of information.

Disturbing Concerns in Vietnam

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Policy Analyst

Internet users in Hanoi will soon find that they can’t reach certain sites when browsing the Web at local Internet cafés. A regulation enacted in April requires that all retail Internet locations install a server-side application by 2011. The application will likely allow the Vietnamese government to block access to websites, as well as to track user activities.

The implementation of an application like this one would choke off access to information for many in Hanoi -- given how popular Internet cafés are among Internet users in Vietnam. If the regulation spreads beyond Hanoi, it will impose these vague and non-transparent restrictions on users all over the country.

Together with the security attacks we detected on Vietnamese human rights activists earlier this year (see our security blog post on "The chilling effects of malware") and intermittent blockages of Facebook and other social networks, this regulation is a troubling example of a government threatening free expression online and an open Internet.

Making U.S. community health data accessible and useful

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist

Today the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are hosting an event called The Community Health Data Forum to highlight the power of transparency in health care. I was pleased to offer one of several technology demonstrations highlighting how health data can help us make better health decisions.

HHS has published useful data about communities, hospitals and nursing homes and made it available for download. As a demonstration project, we combined some of this information using Google Fusion Tables, a database service in the cloud that makes it easy to explore, visualize and share structured data. Using Fusion Tables we created a customized map to display information from the database. For example, you can see a map of "heart friendly" and "people friendly" hospitals, based on statistics from HHS:



It's important to note that the science behind measuring the quality of hospitals and health care in general is still evolving, so we can't make definitive conclusions from this data. However, this kind of transparency will lead to discussion, questions, and analysis which we hope will improve choices and outcomes. We encourage you to explore the new data from HHS, including visualizations like the one above, using our published table.

Let the Sunshine in

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Head, Public Sector Lab

Public=Online is the the rallying cry during this year’s Sunshine Week, an annual event to highlight the importance of open government and the freedom of information. The week is sponsored by the American Society of News Editors, and many editorial boards have echoed the thoughts of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

“...government information ought to be made available to the public as quickly as possible, with a minimum of rigmarole and in the easiest, most accessible way possible--which these days means via the Internet.”

We agree--and what better way to celebrate Sunshine Week than with leading thinkers on government, media and citizen engagement on all sides of the political spectrum who feel the same? Yesterday at our Google D.C. office, the Sunlight Foundation announced its Public=Online campaign.

It’s exciting to see growing support for transparency and to see the progress that’s been made in the last year alone. Every day, through sites like Data.gov and projects like Open Congress, OMB Watch and our Public Data Explorer, more data is available online.

But there’s still a gap between having access to government data and easily understanding what it means. To help fill this gap, Google has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation in its Design for America contest to make government data more comprehensible to the public.

You can learn more and get started on the contest homepage. There’s room for all kinds of folks to participate, and we can’t think of a more fun way to keep the spirit of Sunshine Week going.

Open government and the Federal Register

Posted by Betsy Masiello, Policy Analyst

For more than 70 years, the Federal Register has been the official daily record for federal agency rules and notices, executive orders, and other presidential documents. But at 80,000 pages per year, it lands on your desk with a thud.

That's one reason why we're excited to see that the U.S. government is taking steps to make the Federal Register more open and accessible to citizens. Starting today, the Federal Register will be published in XML format to Data.gov, which will allow third-parties to develop new ways to organize, re-organize, and analyze its contents. Past issues of the Federal Register dating back to 2000 will also be posted online.

We're already seeing cool new tools emerge around this data. This morning Ed Felten of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy announced the launch of Fedthread.org, which allows users to annotate and search the Federal Register. The tool also allows users to set up customized RSS feeds for specific search queries, which will allow users to track items and issues over time. Amazingly, the project took only 10 days to create.

The Washington Post describes the Federal Register as the "de facto daily newspaper of the executive branch." Making the Federal Register available on Data.gov is an important step towards making that newspaper more accessible to citizens across the country.

Gov 2.0 Summit videos

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google Public Sector Blog.)

If you weren't able to make the Gov 2.0 Summit last week in DC, you're in luck - videos of most presentations are now online.

A few Googlers had the chance to participate as speakers.

John Markoff of the New York Times led a discussion about developing an effective platform with TCP/IP creator and Googler Vint Cerf, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Tim Sparapani.



And as we mentioned on a previous post, Tim O'Reilly interviewed Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian about how government can take advantage of real time data and economic indicators.



We'll post an update when Ola Rosling's presentation on public data search and visualization is online.

Introducing Google for the Public Sector

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

The 2008 elections demonstrated how technology can increase political participation, and now we're beginning to see the power of Web 2.0 come to government.

On the heels of last week's Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., we're excited to launch Google for the Public Sector, a one-stop shop of tools and tips that local, state and federal government officials can use to help promote transparency and increase citizen participation.

The site helps government agencies:

• Make your website, and the information it offers, easier to find. For example, in less than 50 technical staff hours, Arizona's Government Information Technology Agency made hundreds of thousands of public records and other webpages "crawlable" to search engines and visible in Google search results.

• Visualize your information and tell your story in Google Earth & Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them. The State Department runs an interactive Google Map of Secretary Clinton's travels, which shows where she has been and includes photos and videos.

• Use the power of online video to engage millions of potential viewers and give constituents a voice. In the U.S. alone, the Senate, House of Representatives, White House, and federal government, among others, all have YouTube channels.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly four out of five American Internet users go online to find government information. Technology will help play a key role in making this information accessible, useful and transparent.

Our recommendations for increasing citizens' access to government information

Posted by Jennifer Marsh, Policy Analyst

Given the tremendous volume of information online -- more than 1 trillion unique URLs and counting -- the ability for users to search for and find relevant content is critical. This couldn't be more true for the tens of millions of pages of content stored on government websites. Unfortunately, many agencies make it difficult or impossible for search engines to index their sites and make information available to citizens who are searching for it.

In response to President Obama's call for ideas on how to open up the government to its citizens, Google put forward recommendations last Friday in which we point to two simple steps government webmasters can take to make sure that search engine queries lead users to the right websites and hopefully, the right answers.

First, agencies can adopt the Sitemaps protocol, which allow search engines to crawl websites more intelligently. Most search engines offer free Sitemap generator tools -- check out Google Sitemap Generator.

Second, agencies can review their robots.txt files. Many agencies currently block large portions of their websites from search engines with robots.txt files, sometimes unknowingly. By reviewing and selectively using these files, webmasters can easily open up large amounts of content to citizens. Free analysis tools like Google's robots.txt test can help webmasters identify which pages are accidentally being blocked.

The next stage in the campaign for open government will come when the Administration encourages agencies to publish their most popular, timely, and relevant data on their websites and data.gov. Static, obscure, and dated information is not useful to citizens who want data relevant to their everyday lives, nor is it helpful to third parties who want to build tools that citizens can use to understand that data.

As it works towards its goal to bring greater transparency to government, we hope that the Administration continues to take the steps necessary to make government information more easily accessible to citizens on the web.