18 April, 2014

Aggregated, normalized, visualizable semantic DB of Transparency Reports from tech companies.

Project featured by EFF and in a series on news outlets.

Note: Silk has been discontinued as of August 2016 and this project is no longer available

An increasing number of Internet and telecommunication companies are publishing reports detailing the number of government requests for user interaction data the companies have received in a given period of time. Technology and telecommunications companies store data on all user interactions. This includes “non-content data” (also called metadata). Metadata consists of login times, user location and IP addresses of users involved in the communication. Technology and telecom companies sometimes store actual content — recordings or copies of emails, chats, video chats, and voice calls. Governments file requests for this data for anti-terrorism surveillance but also for drug investigations and other law enforcement purposes. Called “Transparency Reports”, these reports also state how often the company complies with the government request.

This projects collects all Transparency Reports from major service providers, normalized into a comprehensive data resource for comparing and investigating worldwide government requests for users’ data.

Read more about the project here and here.