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Verizon’s Transparency Report for the First Half of 2014

“In the first half of 2014, Verizon received approximately 150,000 requests for customer information from federal, state or local law enforcement in the United States. We do not release customer information unless authorized by law, such as a valid law enforcement demand or an appropriate request in an emergency involving the danger of death or serious physical injury…Verizon has teams that carefully review each demand we receive. We do not produce information in response to all demands we receive. In the first half of this year, we rejected as invalid approximately three percent of the subpoenas we received and approximately four and one-half percent of the orders and warrants we received. We might reject a demand as legally invalid for a number of reasons, including that a different type of legal process is needed for the type of information requested. When we reject a demand as invalid, we do not produce any information…In the first half of 2014, the 72,342 subpoenas we received sought information regarding 132,499 information points, such as a telephone number, used to identify a customer. These customer identifiers are also referred to as “selectors.” On average, each subpoena sought information about 1.8 selectors. The number of selectors is usually greater than the number of customer accounts: if a customer had multiple telephone numbers, for instance, it’s possible that a subpoena seeking information about multiple selectors was actually seeking information about just one customer. We have also determined that during the first half of the year, approximately 75 percent of the subpoenas we received sought information on only one selector (and thus only one customer), and approximately 90 percent sought information regarding three or fewer selectors (and thus three or fewer customers).”

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