Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple have joined forces in a civil liberties group to attempt to get the government to be more transparent. They have submitted a letter to President Barrack Obama and Congress to allow ISP’s and other telecommunication companies to offer more details about requests from the governmental branches.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has barred Google and Microsoft from discussing any requests for information from our government. They are working to be allowed to disclose these requests to the public.
There is a movement of 63 different companies that are requesting the ability to disclose more information about these requests in annual and quarterly reports. They would like to disclose as much information as possible, this way they can forward this on down to their users and possibly gain more trust in companies by doing so.
According to AllThingsD, the alliance includes companies and groups such as AOL, Digg, Dropbox, Evoca, Heyzap, LinkedIn, Meetup, Mozilla, Reddit, Salesforce.com, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo, YouNow, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator, Public Knowledge, Reporters Without Borders, and the Wikimedia Foundation.