Verizon said it received 149,000 requests for customer information from US law enforcement in the first half of 2014, a reduction from the 161,000 requests delivered in H1 2013.

The information is included in the operator’s second Transparency Report. Back in January this year, it claimed to be the first telecoms company to publish such a report.

Since then a growing number of operators have followed its lead, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, both in June

Verizon gave figures for all of 2013 in January. However, n its new report, it halved those numbers to provide a meaningful comparison with the new H1 2014 numbers.

Of the 149,000 total, nearly half (72,000) were subpoenas to obtain subscriber information, such as name and address for a customer with a phone number or IP address. Other subpoenas asked for information such as the phone numbers a customer called. However, a subpoena cannot include the content of communications such as SMS or location information, said the operator.

The company rejected as invalid about three per cent of the subpoenas it received.

In addition, Verizon received 37,000 court orders, of which 4,000 required the operator to provide so-called pen register/trap & trace wiretap orders. The former relates to real-time access to numbers as they are dialled while the latter covers real-time access to incoming calls.

The company also received 15,000 warrant requests and 24,000 emergency requests where there is a need to act because of the danger of death or serious physical injury.

While the company does offer some data on national security demands made by the US government, the amount of information it publishes is sparse in comparison with the law enforcement requests.

The operator also received requests for customer information from international law enforcement agencies in the first half of 2014, of which the most came from France (762) ahead of Germany (670). The UK’s 177 requests were low by comparison with its two European peers.