Facebook received up to 10,000 requests from the US government for user data in the second half of last year, the company has revealed.
It said that after a week of negotiations with US security officials, the company is allowed to make new revelations about government orders for user data.
Facebook’s top lawyer, Ted Ullyot said in a statement that it is only allowed to talk about total numbers, but it is lobbying to reveal more, and the permission received is unprecedented.
Mr Ullyot says Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from government entities in the last six months of 2012, on subjects from missing children to terrorist threats.
In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are pressuring the Obama administration to loosen its legal gag on government surveillance orders.
The companies are seeking to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named PRISM revealed in leaks last week.