PRISM: Apple discloses US government data requests
People walk past the Apple store at Grand Central Terminal in New York City on January 25, 2013. Apple shares slid about 12 percent a day earlier after the tech giant posted record profits and sales of its iPhones and iPads, but offered a disappointing forecast for the coming months.
Apple joined Facebook and Microsoft Monday, as the latest tech firm to confirm details of United States' government requests to hand over data from its users' accounts and devices.
The company said it received 4,000 and 5,000 requests from law enforcement for customer data for the first six months of 2012.
Those requests gathered information from between 9,000 and 10,000 Apple user accounts, some pertaining to national security.
More from GlobalPost: Facebook confirms US govt. requested surveillance data
These kind of disclosures have been slowly trickling out from tech companies who say they have to clear any information they disclose to the government with the public.
The problem, according to lawyers at Apple, Twitter, Google, Facebook, is the government isn't allowing them to specify which requests are coming directly from the National Security Agency, or how many.
Twitter's legal counsel Benjamin Lee tweeted:
The companies say they want to provide some transparency about how their customers' data is being used, in the wake of recent revelations about the NSA PRISM surveillance program.
Apple's number of requests are in line with Facebook's disclosure that it also received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data over six months last year.
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