Alliance of technology companies demand increased transpar.

[Sabre]

AllThingsD

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft are part of a broad alliance of technology companies and civil liberties groups that will tomorrow demand dramatically increased transparency around U.S. government surveillance efforts.
In a letter to be published Thursday, the alliance — whose members include 63 companies, investors, non-profits and trade organizations — will call upon President Obama and congressional leaders to allow Internet, telephone, and Web-based service providers to report national security-related requests for information with greater specificity. Specifically, they ask that they are allowed to regularly report:
• The number of government requests for information about their users
• The number of individuals, accounts, or devices for which information was requested
• The number of requests that sought communications content, basic subscriber information, and/or other information.
The coalition also asks that the government begin issuing a transparency report of its own that provides essentially the same information — the total number of information requests made and the number of individuals affected by each.