The world's second-largest mobile telecommunications company today revealed that governments in a handful of countries are eavesdropping on citizens via a direct connection to Vodafone.

The news was revealed in Vodafone's first Law Enforcement Disclosure report, which is chock full of details on legal frameworks, governance principles, and operating procedures in the 29 countries where Vodafone operates.

Some of those procedures include lawful interceptionalso known as wiretapping. While most government agencies require legal notices to eavesdrop on customer conversations, others simply have a direct line to users.

"In a small number of countries the law dictates that specific agencies and authorities must have direct access to an operator's network, bypassing any form of operational control over lawful interception on the part of the operator," Vodafone's report said.

Several countries, including Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, South Africa, and Turkey, forbid the government to disclose wiretapping information.

According to The Guardian (which produced the accompanying graphic), companies like Vodafone do not know which customers - or how many - are spied on.

"After months of detailed analysis, it has become clear that there is, in fact, very little coherence and consistency in law and agency and authority practice," Vodafone said"even between neighboring EU Member States."

Individual governments suffer from what the company called "highly divergent views" about the most appropriate response to public demands for greater transparency.

On the one-year anniversary of the Snowden NSA leaks, consumers are more hungry than ever for a clear understanding of what goes on behind closed government doors. This week, a number of websites, organizations, and coders banded together to "Reset the Net."

The digital protest gained support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Mozilla, and Reddit, among many others, in hopes of promoting Web privacy and encouraging more firms to adopt end-to-end encryption.

For more, see A Year of Snowden Revelations: What Has Changed, as well as How to Stay Anonymous Online.

And keep an eye out for annual updates to Vodafone's new transparency report, which covers wiretapping demands between April 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014. The service provider promised annual revisions as new communications data becomes available.

The Snowden documents accused U.S. Internet companies of providing the NSA with direct connections to their servers, something they strongly denied. Firms like Google have since pushed for stronger encryption technology so that the feds cannot spy on them.

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