Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Three of Every Four Government Demands for Your Verizon Data Never See a Judge

291,486 demands in one year. A spy law that expired in June while the spying kept running. And the fine print Verizon publishes about all of it, thirteen years after Edward Snowden forced the industry to start talking.

The government asked Verizon for customer data 291,486 times in 2024. That is about 800 demands a day, weekends included, from federal, state, and local law enforcement combined. Roughly three out of four of those demands never crossed a judge’s desk. Those are not my numbers. They are Verizon’s, published in the company’s own semiannual transparency reports, in plain sight, where almost nobody reads them.

I read them, along with the FAQ Verizon attaches to those reports and the declassified court order that started the modern surveillance debate in 2013. This piece walks the whole machine: what each legal instrument is, what it gets, who signs off, and what happened this summer when the flagship foreign-surveillance statute expired and the collection kept going anyway.

The confession is on the company website

Verizon announced its first transparency report in December 2013, six months after Snowden’s leaks put the company’s name on the front page of the Guardian. It has published one every six months since. The report for the second half of 2024, the most recent full accounting available with a working link, breaks the 146,291 demands from that period into categories: 73,862 subpoenas, 4,532 general court orders, 5,999 pen register and trap-and-trace orders, 303 wiretap orders, 25,031 warrants, and 36,564 emergency requests. Add the first half of the year and you get the 291,486 figure. The company’s report covering the first half of 2025 shows the warrant count climbing again, to 27,721.

Here is the arithmetic behind my headline. Subpoenas require no judge. Verizon’s own FAQ says a prosecutor or law enforcement official can issue one without judicial approval. Emergency requests require no judge either, only a written certification from an officer that death or serious injury is at stake. In 2024 those two no-judge categories totaled 218,822 demands, 75 percent of everything the government sent. National Security Letters, which I will get to, need no judge and are not even in that count.

To Verizon’s credit, the company says it rejected or produced nothing for roughly one in ten demands, and it usually does not bill the government for the rest. But the volume is the story. A carrier serving a nine-figure customer base fields a government data demand about every two minutes, around the clock, and the legal system treats most of that flow as routine paperwork.

The ladder, from weakest to strongest

Federal law builds a ladder of legal process, and each rung buys the government more of your life. The bottom rung is the subpoena. In exchange for no judicial review at all, it yields the six categories listed in the Stored Communications Act: name, address, subscriber number, length of service, calling records, and payment records. About half the subpoenas Verizon receives seek nothing more than the name and address behind a phone number or IP address. That sounds modest until you remember what calling records reveal: who you talk to, when, and how often, which is a map of your whole life drawn without a warrant.

The middle rungs are the real-time tools. A pen register order gives law enforcement live access to every number you dial and every address you visit; a trap-and-trace order captures every number that calls you. Verizon handled 5,999 of those orders in the second half of 2024, against just 303 full wiretap orders, the only instrument that lets the government listen to the content of a call as it happens and the hardest order for police to get. The pattern is the point: the government listens to conversations rarely and harvests the records around them constantly, because the records are cheaper, easier, and nearly as revealing.

The top rung is the warrant, probable cause found by a judge. In the second half of 2024 alone, Verizon received 11,733 warrants for stored content, 22,486 warrants for location data, and 5,725 warrants or orders for cell tower dumps, where the government takes the phone number of every device that touched a specific tower during a window of time. If you drove past the wrong antenna at the wrong hour, your number may sit in an evidence file for a crime you never heard of.

Letters that never see a courtroom

Then there is the instrument that skips the courthouse entirely. A National Security Letter is an FBI demand for subscriber information in national-security investigations. Verizon’s FAQ states the mechanics in one flat sentence: “The FBI does not need to go to court to issue an NSL.” A senior official certifies internally that the information is relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation, and the letter goes out. The recipient must comply.

Verizon’s own FAQ on National Security Letters: no court required, only an internal FBI certification. Screenshot: verizon.com transparency report FAQ, captured July 2026.

An NSL reaches four things: name, address, length of service, and toll billing records. No content, no location. What makes the tool corrosive is the gag. NSLs typically prohibit the recipient from telling anyone the letter exists, and until the USA FREEDOM Act forced periodic review, those gags ran forever. Verizon can report its NSL count only in government-approved bands of 500; for the second half of 2024 the band was zero to 499 letters covering 1,000 to 1,499 customer identifiers. The company also disclosed that the FBI has lifted the gag on exactly six letters, ever, allowing Verizon to confirm it complied with each. Six.

What an NSL pulls without a judge: name, address, length of service, and toll billing records. Screenshot: verizon.com transparency report FAQ, captured July 2026.

The order that proved the rumors

On June 5, 2013, the Guardian published a document no member of the public was ever supposed to see: a secondary order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, docket BR 13-80, signed by Judge Roger Vinson on April 25, 2013. It directed Verizon Business Network Services to hand the NSA, on an ongoing daily basis, all call detail records for communications “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” Every number dialed, every call received, duration, routing data, device identifiers. Not for suspects. For everyone on the network, renewed roughly every 90 days under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law Congress passed six weeks after September 11. The order even contained its own gag, barring anyone from revealing it existed. Its declassification date was set for April 2038. Snowden beat that schedule by 25 years.

Days later, the 29-year-old contractor put his name and face on the leak in a Hong Kong hotel room, telling Glenn Greenwald, “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things.” Watch the original interview and notice what holds up: almost every capability he described in 2013 has since been confirmed in declassified documents and the government’s own reporting.

The Guardian’s June 2013 interview with Edward Snowden, filmed by Laura Poitras in Hong Kong. Video: The Guardian, YouTube.

What Congress killed, eventually

The bulk phone-records program did die, slowly and face down. Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act in June 2015, ending bulk collection and replacing it with a “call detail records” system in which carriers kept the data and the NSA queried it target by target with court approval. The replacement leaked at the seams. Government transparency figures showed the agency pulled in more than 534 million call records in 2017 from just 40 approved targets, because each target’s contacts, and their contacts, came along for the ride. The NSA shut the program down in 2019 after repeated compliance failures, and the underlying Section 215 authority expired on March 15, 2020. Congress has never revived it. That is the one clean kill in this story, and it took seven years from the Guardian’s front page to the statute’s grave.

What survived, even its own expiration

Section 702 of FISA is the bigger sibling. Enacted in 2008, it lets the government compel U.S. providers to hand over the communications of foreign targets abroad without individualized warrants, and it sweeps in the emails, texts, and calls of Americans on the other end of those conversations, which the FBI can then search. Congress reauthorized it in April 2024 through the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, a two-year extension that also widened the class of businesses that can be conscripted to assist.

Then came this spring. The April 20, 2026 sunset arrived with no deal. Congress passed a ten-day patch, then a 45-day patch, and on the night of June 11 the House rejected a further extension, 198 to 218, an unusual coalition of most Democrats and a bloc of reform-minded Republicans. At midnight on June 12, Section 702 lapsed for the first time since its creation.

And nothing stopped. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had already approved the program’s annual certifications in March 2026, and those certifications, along with the directives issued to companies under them, stay valid until March 2027 regardless of the statute’s death. A provider that refuses a directive faces fines that can run to $250,000 per day. As of this writing, Congress has not reauthorized the law, and the collection continues on schedule.

The Supreme Court’s half-step

For four decades the legal foundation under all of this was the third-party doctrine, born in Smith v. Maryland in 1979: records you voluntarily hand a company, such as the numbers you dial, carry no Fourth Amendment protection. The digital age turned that 1970s logic into a skeleton key, because modern life hands companies everything.

Carpenter v. United States cracked it. Timothy Carpenter’s carriers gave the government 12,898 location points tracking him across 127 days, all obtained with a mere court order. On June 22, 2018, a 5-to-4 Supreme Court held that acquiring a week or more of historical cell-site location records is a search requiring a warrant. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Court would not hand the state “unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information.” You can see the ruling working in Verizon’s own tables: the company reports that warrants have climbed and general orders have fallen since 2018, a direct product of that decision. But Carpenter was deliberately narrow. Shorter tracking periods, real-time location, tower dumps, and the purchase of location data from commercial brokers all remain open questions the Court has not answered.

Then China walked in through the wiretap door

Every capability described above depends on infrastructure, and in 1994 Congress ordered it built. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every U.S. carrier to install interception capability directly into its network so court-ordered surveillance can be switched on like a utility. For thirty years, security engineers warned that a mandated backdoor is a door, and doors do not check ID.

In the fall of 2024, the Wall Street Journal revealed that a Chinese state-linked hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon had burrowed into AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen, and had reached the lawful-intercept systems those carriers maintain under CALEA, the very machinery built for American court orders. Subsequent reporting and federal briefings put the targets as high as they go, including communications associated with Donald Trump and JD Vance during the 2024 campaign. The FBI has described the operation as among the most consequential cyberespionage breaches in American history, with victims notified across roughly 600 organizations and 80-plus countries. As late as this February, Senator Maria Cantwell was warning that the intruders may still be inside U.S. networks. The surveillance state built a master key to every American phone network, and a foreign intelligence service picked it up.

The bill, such as it is

One more detail from the fine print deserves daylight. Federal law and most state laws let carriers charge the government a reimbursement fee for producing records or maintaining a wiretap. Verizon says it usually waives the fee, never charges for emergencies or most subpoenas, and recoups only part of its costs when it does bill. Read that as you like. I read it as a system so frictionless that the largest carrier in the country processes hundreds of thousands of surveillance demands a year and mostly does not bother to invoice.

Verizon’s FAQ on fees: reimbursement is allowed by law, and the company mostly does not seek it. Screenshot: verizon.com transparency report FAQ, captured July 2026.

The New Hampshire answer

New Hampshire saw this coming and did something almost no other state has done. On November 6, 2018, about 81 percent of Granite State voters approved Question 2, writing a freestanding right to privacy into Part I of the state constitution as Article 2-b: an individual’s right to live free from “governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.” The amendment was a bipartisan project, sponsored by Republican Rep. Neal Kurk and Democratic Rep. Renny Cushing, passed 235 to 96 in the House and 15 to 9 in the Senate before the voters made it law. Kurk pitched it plainly as a Fourth Amendment update for the information age.

Be honest about its reach. Article 2-b binds New Hampshire government, so it cannot switch off a FISA directive or an FBI letter; federal law controls federal spies. What it can do is give every NH resident, and every NH court, a textual weapon against state and local surveillance the U.S. Constitution’s drafters never imagined, from license plate readers on Route 106 to a local department buying location data instead of getting a warrant. The state that stamps Live Free or Die on its plates put teeth behind the slogan by a four-to-one vote. Teeth only matter if somebody bites: in courtrooms where litigants raise the article, and at police commission meetings where residents ask which of these tools their own department uses. This newsroom has covered how New Hampshire shelved the bill to open body camera footage and how the post-9/11 security apparatus corroded American principles it claimed to defend. This story is the connective tissue between the two.

Start with the reading assignment. Verizon’s transparency report is public, free, and updated every six months. So are AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s. The companies published these documents because one man with a thumb drive made silence impossible, and the least we owe that bargain is to read what it bought. The numbers are sitting there, 291,486 of them for last year alone, waiting for someone to mind.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every hyperlink above was opened and confirmed live on July 25, 2026. Sources that could not be opened directly, including the Guardian’s original 2013 story and Verizon’s first-half 2025 report PDF, are cited by name without links, and claims resting on them are marked ATTRIBUTED in the table. Screenshots are the editor’s own captures of Verizon’s public FAQ; the wording was matched against the live page. Section 702’s status is current as of this article’s publication date and may change; check the sources above for later action. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.