The Department of Justice has agreed to ease the restrictions on tech companies’ attempts to publicly release statistics on certain data requests that were previously blocked by gag order.

In the past, the transparency reports of various companies like Google could only provide a broad range of the number of National Security Letters (NSLs) the company had received from the government. They were blocked from providing any data on orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

However, in his speech 10 days ago, Obama outlined numerous surveillance reforms including a promise to “enable communications providers to make public more information than ever before about the orders that they have received to provide data to the government.”

That means that they will allow tech giants to be more transparent with their consumers about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, although the Justice Department’s announcement makes it clear that the figures will still be quite vague.

Continue reading at: http://endthelie.com/2014/01/27/feds-to-allow-tech-companies-to-rel...