Law Enforcement Transparency Report 2014: July 1 – December 31

This is the third installment of Leaseweb’s bi-annually Law Enforcement Transparency Report. It shows the number of demands we received in the prior six months. The figures below are for the period of July 1^st – December 31^st, 2013.

Leaseweb believes that clients and other stakeholders deserve a clear articulation of Leaseweb’s obligations and responsibilities to increase their understanding on how we ensure the highest quality of service, while adhering to the law. Customers are increasingly using technology to communicate and to store private and sensitive information. Like others in the technology industry, we believe it is important for the public to have transparent information about law enforcement access to customer data.

The company policy of Leaseweb on the subject of Internet content is clear. We are content agnostic, meaning we host all content as long as it is legal in the jurisdiction in which it is hosted.

Scope

With the above in mind, we are now unveiling an update to the Leaseweb Transparency Report. We have compiled this report with the data for the last six months of 2013. The goal of this report is to shed light on the following types of law enforcement requests and/or court orders we have received:

• Government requests for customer information
• Government requests for forensic images
• Government requests to remove content
• Government requests for lawful intercepts
• Child abuse material notices

This data covers law enforcement requests and/or court orders for the separate Leaseweb operating entities received from July until the end of December 2013. We only received requests related to our dedicated hosting and cloud offerings. Our shared webhosting, domain name, and colocation offerings generated no requests.

	Netherlands	United States	Germany
Customer information	47	10	293
*partially rejected	20	–	–
*totally rejected	8	2	102
Child abuse material	112	2	64
*websites	27	–	3
*URLs	3060	9	1468
Lawful intercepts	–	–	1
Removal of content	–	–	1
Forensic images	2	–	–

The figures above specify the total number of valid law enforcement requests Leaseweb received in the last half of 2013. Leaseweb rejects law enforcement requests, in total or in part, if they are invalid, incomprehensible, or otherwise have no basis under an appropriate law, or we do not have the requested data available.

Leaseweb Germany received one request for an IPv6 address (the first ever for any Leaseweb entity), the requested information was provided. Leaseweb Germany received a request, from a foreign authority, to remove a website this request was denied. The number of partially rejected Dutch requests can be attributed to requests where Leaseweb Netherlands only provided ‘name, address, place of residence’ information. We have not added a listing for National Security Letters, as there was no reason to do so.

Foreign requests

Leaseweb maintains operations with a physical presence in three countries. Therefore, we only disclose data in these three countries as we have the ability to validate the lawfulness of requests for these locations. Direct requests from foreign authorities are refused. Normally we will advise requesting authorities on how they can obtain the data. For this, the foreign authority needs to file a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) request with the competent authority in the jurisdiction of the operating company that holds the data. Leaseweb operating companies cannot divulge information held by other Leaseweb operating companies, as they have no access to this data. We therefore also reject requests from a national authority if they request customer data from a foreign Leaseweb entity.

	Netherlands	United States	Germany
Foreign law enforcement requests (foreign to Leaseweb subsidiary)	5	–	3
National law enforcement requests for foreign Leaseweb subsidiary data	–	2	69

The number above indicate Leaseweb Netherlands received five requests from non-Dutch authorities, while Leaseweb Germany received three requests from non-German authorities (one was a request to remove a website). The German authorities contacted Leaseweb Germany 69 times with requests for data concerning either Leaseweb Netherlands or Leaseweb USA, while the U.S. authorities contacted Leaseweb USA twice for data concerning Leaseweb Netherlands and Leaseweb Germany. All requests have been rejected as per our policies.

Observations

We see that Germany has a disproportional number of requests. This (in our opinion) can be attributed to the fact that German Police has an obligation to investigate every report. The Snowden revelations indicate the U.S. has a near unlimited remit for spying outside the U.S., while their options within the U.S. are severely restricted. The numbers for the U.S. indicate this might be true. As for the Netherlands, most of the requests we received are based on (US) MLAT request. We see it is easier for the U.S. authorities to retrieve information from the Netherlands than to get local U.S. data. The disproportionate number of rejected requests is due to the fact police officers are legally only allowed to request information concerning, name, address and place of residence. For payment information or any other information they need a warrant from a Public Prosecutor or a Judge, in the cases we rejected request police officers did overstep their remit.

Company background

Leaseweb is a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider serving a worldwide portfolio of 15,000 customers ranging from SMBs to enterprises. Services include Public Cloud, Private Cloud, CDN (Content Delivery Network) Hybrid Hosting, Colocation, and Dedicated Servers and hybrid solutions. All services are backed by 24/7 support and global network with a total capacity of more than 4.0 Tbps. With more than 60,000 servers under management, Leaseweb has provided infrastructure for mission-critical websites, Internet applications, email servers, security, and storage services since 1997.

Leaseweb offers services through its various subsidiaries (operating companies), being Leaseweb Netherlands B.V. (“Leaseweb Netherlands”), Leaseweb USA, Inc. (“Leaseweb USA”), and Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH (“Leaseweb Germany”). CDN services are provided by Leaseweb CDN B.V. For more information, visit www.leaseweb.com.