We report the number of demands for customer information that we received during the first half of 2021 from law enforcement in each country outside the U.S. where we did business (and had such demands) and where reporting such information is not legally prohibited. The table below presents the number of demands we received during the first half of 2021. Following that number, in parentheses, is the number of customer selectors at issue in those demands. The table presents data for the past couple of years. Data from prior periods can be found by clicking the “Archive” tab at the top of the page.
A few notes about the table. A customer selector is an information point, such as a telephone number or IP address, used to identify a given customer. While our initial Transparency Reports displayed only the number of customer selectors, we now also present the number of demands we received. To provide more detail, we have divided the number of demands in the table below into two categories. A demand for “subscriber information” typically requires that we provide the name and address of the customer assigned to a given phone number or IP address. A demand for “transactional information” may seek, for instance, a log of numbers called.
We also report the number of lawful demands for intercepts (and the number of customer selectors at issue in those demands) that we received from law enforcement in Germany and the Netherlands, which are the only countries other than the U.S. where we received demands to intercept content and where we are not precluded from reporting.
While the laws in each country may differ, Verizon has trained professionals that carefully review each demand we receive. We review the demands based on each country’s laws, and we only produce information in response to valid demands. We note that the vast majority of demands we receive are, in fact, legally valid, but we push back on those that are not. We do not produce information in response to all demands (even if valid) when, for instance, we do not have any responsive data to produce.
Finally, as explained in the notes accompanying the table, there are some limits to what we can disclose regarding law enforcement demands.