After the Guardian and other publications revealed that US spy agencies relied on cooperation from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo to gather up Americans’ electronic communications, the companies protested that government secrecy rules prevented them from disclosing details about the data they gave US intelligence agencies.
Now, two of those companies, Microsoft and Google, are pressing forward with a lawsuit to force the government to let them disclose more data, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a company blog post.
Negotiations with the Department of Justice failed, Smith wrote, because the companies wanted to publish statistics about both requests for the actual contents of emails and other communications, and simpler “metadata” requests, such as the sender or recipient of an email.
