Google petitions US government again to let it publish NSA PRISM FISA requests

Tech giant Google has formally petitioned the US government to let it publish information detailing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests it received from the NSA as a part of the agency's notorious PRISM campaign.
Google's director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, and director of public policy and government affairs, Pablo Chavez, confirmed filing the petition in a public blog post. The two Google directors said the firm would also make a similar request during a meeting with the President's Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies scheduled for Monday.
"Today we filed an amended petition in the US 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," read the blog post.
"In addition, along with a number of other companies and trade associations, we are 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."
Google is one of many companies to call on the US government to let them publish information detailing what data they released to the NSA. Prior to the Google directors admission, Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith confirmed the two companies planned to work together in their bid to release FISA request information.
Prior to Microsoft and Google, Yahoo won a court order allowing the declassification of documents that reveal its efforts fighting the NSA's data requests. News of the PRISM scandal broke in July this year when ex-CIA analyst Edward Snowden leaked classified documents to the press. The documents showed the NSA is siphoning vast amounts of user data from big-name tech companies.
Outside of its petition to the US government Google has mounted several other initiatives designed to help protect its customers. Most recently reports broke that Google is rushing to encrypt information stored and passing through its data centres, before the NSA has a chance to scan it.