I think the rules said the companies are not allowed to disclose the exact amount of FISA requests. Instead they need to bundle them together with other requests from law enforcement.
They are not saying they are bundling them together - they are saying these are requests from law enforcement. It could just be a sloppy PR department, who knows.
Since multiple PR depts are saying largely the same thing, I'm inclined to believe this is what they've been informed they can release.
Re:Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy
by Intermernet on Monday June 17, 2013 @05:55AM
(#5892259)
I didn't know this until a minute ago, but it seems that the NSA have a Police branch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agencie... and http://www.nsa.gov/careers/faqs/).
I wonder if they serve their requests via that branch, or another. it'd be convenient to serve the requests from a more bureaucratic branch of the agency in order to allow them to fall outside of "law enforcement requests".
As far as I know, that is a police force that police the NSA offices, seeing as there's obvious security concerns about letting police that don't have the right security clearances onto their grounds.
Since when would anyone start to lump NSA in with "law enforcement". The focus on law enforcement in general in that statement is curious since that's not really what all the noise has been about.
Maybe their PR team are just a bunch of buffoons that have still not realised that these statements gets dissected, but it is rather odd that they when releasing a statement to try to stem criticism based on their previous choice of words again choose wording that is so ambiguous
In fact, if I were to trust this (and I can't decide if I should), my main reason for trusting them is that I'm wondering if they wouldn't just flat out lie and give a much stronger denial if they are in fact feeding the NSA with tons of data.