In the vein of what Google has done for a few years now, Twitter released a “transparency tool” on Monday. The company showed the public for the first time exactly how many times governments ask for user information or ask for content to be taken down. The tool also shows how many DMCA takedown requests are made. The new tool's release comes on the same day that a New York criminal judge denied Twitter's motion to quash a subpoena request for an Occupy Wall Street protestor's data.

Not surprisingly, requests from the United States government top the list, coming in at 679 (out of 849 requests made in 2012). Twitter complied in whole or in part with 75 percent of those requests. The report shows that the company did not comply with any government content removal requests. The transparency tool measures requests between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2012.

By comparison, American authorities requested over 3,800 items via court order from Google in the second half of 2011. Google says it complied with 40 percent of the American requests.

"I think that the US government has a pretty good handle on the fact of who has certain kinds of information and they understand that they can ask for it," Eva Galperin, international freedom of expression coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "I would not be surprised to see other countries join in the act in the next couple of years."

But, as Galperin pointed out, most companies do not voluntarily give up such information, because they are not required to.

Still, Twitter added that there is a worrying trend that can be gleaned from the first six months of data.

“We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011,” the company wrote in a blog post.