This article is more than 1 year old

Content delivery network CloudFlare's court order count soars

50 legal letters land in six months as spooks seek insights into traffic

Content delivery network CloudFlare says it has received 50 court orders in the first half of this year, more than double that clocked in the whole of 2014.

The statistics, which do not include search warrants, were revealed in the web defender's latest transparency report show it received 22 court orders in the first half of last year and 22 in the second.

Of those received this year only a small number accounts for the record 2120 affected domains and the 96 linked accounts.

This was the same for 2014 where 802 domains and 167 accounts were affected by the court orders.

CloudFlare and its acquired company stopthehacker.com were served only 28 orders for all of 2013, and was hit with three search warrants, one trap and trace order, and a single mutual legal assistance treaty request in the first half of this year.

It received less than 250 US National Security Letters, a metric which the touchy spy apparatus has mandated is as transparent as organisations are allowed to report.

"CloudFlare's approach to law enforcement requests is that we are supportive of their work; however, any request we receive must strictly adhere to the due process of law and be subject to judicial oversight," the company says in the report.

"It is not CloudFlare's intent to make law enforcement's job harder, nor easier. We respect the work they do and appreciate their assistance in protecting the rights of our customers.

"It is our policy to notify our customers of a subpoena or other legal process requesting their customer or billing information before disclosure of information."

The company says it has never:

  • Turned over our SSL keys or our customers SSL keys to anyone;
  • Installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network;
  • Terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure,
  • Provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network.

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