The Trump Justice Department subpoenaed data on 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses, Apple said in a statement on Friday.
Apple said it received the subpoena for data as issued by a federal grand jury in February 2018, along with a “nondisclosure order signed by a federal magistrate judge,” according to CNN.
The company said the subpoena “provided no information on the nature of the investigation and it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users’ accounts. Consistent with the request, Apple limited the information it provided to account subscriber information and did not provide any content such as emails or pictures.”
Apple would normally inform customers of such a request but they were unable to do so in this case because of the nondisclosure agreement which was extended three times, each each lasting a year. The company informed the affected customers on May 5 this year when the agreement was not extended.
Microsoft also said on Friday that they received a subpoena related to a congressional staffer’s personal email account in 2017 but was unable to inform the staffer because a gag order was in effect for more than two years.
“In 2017 Microsoft received a subpoena related to a personal email account,” Microsoft said in a statement to CNN. “As we’ve said before, we believe customers have a constitutional right to know when the government requests their email or documents, and we have a right to tell them. In this case, we were prevented from notifying the customer for more than two years because of a gag order. As soon as the gag order expired, we notified the customer who told us they were a congressional staffer. We then provided a briefing to the representative’s staff following that notice. We will continue to aggressively seek reform that imposes reasonable limits on government secrecy in cases like this.”
According to the New York Times, the Trump Justice Department subpoenaed and seized data from Apple on the communications of at least two Democratic members of Congress, including House Intelligence chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), congressional aides and their family members to find who was leaking to the media about contacts between Trump officials and the Russians in 2017 and 2018.
Rep. Eric Swalwell later told CNN that he was the other member of Congress whose metadata the Trump DOJ requested from Apple.
The DOJ internal watchdog will investigate the subpoena for documents on members of Congress and their families as well as the Trump administration seeking phone and email records of journalists, according to the Hill.
