In Just 6 Months, the NSA Spied on More Than 59,000 Accounts

Four tech giants embroiled in the government’s secret PRISM collection program reported today that they had received classified national security demands for the contents of at least 59,000 user accounts during the first half of 2013.

In the wake of a legal battle to provide more transparency about the number of government national security requests they receive for customer information, Yahoo reported that between January and June last year, the government sought content for between 30,000 and 40,000 user accounts, mostly using classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Google reported that it received FISC requests for content on between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts during the same period. In the case of both companies, the number of accounts affected far outweighed the number of requests they received, indicating that at least some of the requests involved data on multiple user accounts. Google, for example, received less than 1,000 requests that encompassed 9,000 user accounts, while Yahoo also received fewer than 1,000 requests, but these affected more than 30,000 accounts.