India requests Verizon to block certain websites

ISLAMABAD ( MEDIA )

Major US telco Verizon which has released a “transparency report” said that India is one of the five countries which have requested it to block certain websites.
“We were required to block access to websites in India but are precluded by law from identifying the specific number of websites. (These figures relate to the number of websites we were required to block access to in 2013”, it said.
It said that it is required to block access to such websites for an ongoing period of time, but it counts such demands only for the year in which they were initially made.
It said that while it has not received such blocking demands in the United States, it did receive such demands in five countries in 2013.

In Colombia, it was required to block access to approximately 1,200 websites that the Colombian government believed contained child pornography. In Greece, the r4equest is to block 424 sites related to online gambling. It also received demands to block websites in Belgium (37) and Portugal (2) related to online gambling or copyright issues.

The transparency report shows the total number of demands for customer information made by law enforcement to Verizon in 2013 in every country in which it does business, and had any such demands, other than the United States.

“While we offer services to business, government and consumer customers in the United States, our focus outside the United States is on business and enterprise customers. Only countries from which we received demands in 2013 are included in this chart. As explained below, there are some limits to what we can disclose regarding law enforcement demands” it said.

 

Verizon said that these figures reflect requests made by law enforcement within a country for data stored within that same country. It is very rare that we receive a request from a government for data stored in another country.

 

“When this occurs, it generally is a request for United States consumer data from a government entity outside the United States; when we receive these infrequent requests, we do not comply and instead direct the requesting government agency to make its request through any applicable diplomatic channels (like the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process) in its country.”