No response from Facebook on govt request

The Bangladesh government had asked the social networking platform Facebook for information on 12 users in the first half of this year.
The network, however, did not provide the government with any information, the company said on Tuesday in its first report on the scale of data inquiries it gets from countries around the world.
Governments sought information on over 38,000 Facebook users for the same period, according to its Global Government Requests Report.
The tech firm admitted partially complying with at least 80 percent of those requests.
Reuters reports: The study follows allegations by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that practically every major Internet company, including the Facebook, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, routinely hands over troves of data on potentially millions of users to national intelligence agencies.
Facebook, which has over one billion users worldwide, said the vast majority of the government requests made to it and many other companies seeking account information in official investigations relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings.
In many of these cases, the requests seek basic subscriber information, such as name and length of service, while other requests may also seek internet protocol (IP) address logs or actual account content.
The report includes both criminal and national security requests.
The US law enforcement authorities were by far the most active in mining Facebook, seeking information on about 20,000 to 21,000 users between January and June this year, a slight rise from the corresponding period last year, when the US agencies had requested information on roughly 18,000 to 19,000 Facebook accounts, according to figures from the company.
Authorities in other countries with large Facebook user bases, including India, the UK and Germany, had also requested information on thousands of users.
Facebook said it individually scrutinised every information request and required governments to meet a “very high legal bar” to receive user data.
Although the full scope of the National Security Agency's electronic data collection programmes remains unclear, Facebook has vigorously contested claims that it allows the US government unfettered access to secretly gather information on a significant fraction of its users.
In the report, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said it hoped to contribute to the “ongoing debate about the proper standards for government requests for user information in official investigations.”
“We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests,” he noted.
The company in June had negotiated with the US government to begin publishing the total number of data requests it receives without specifying how many are related to law enforcement investigations as opposed to intelligence-gathering efforts.