Google and other tech companies have been actively fighting at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an attempt to tell the public more about the types of US law enforcement orders that they must comply with.

While that case continues, Google announced on Thursday that US government (local, state, federal) requests for data has reached 21,683 users between January through June 2013.

By comparison, the company’s previous reporting period (July through December 2012) saw requests from US authorities for 14,791 accounts—a jump of about 32 percent. Again, the United States remains at the top of this list by a wide margin. India, Germany, France and the United Kingdom round out the next four positions, respectively.

“Since we began sharing these figures with you in 2010, requests from governments for user information have increased by more than 100 percent, wrote Richard Salgado, a Google legal director, in a post on Google+. “This comes as usage of our services continues to grow, but also as more governments have made requests than ever before. And these numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish.”

For the first time, though, Google did break out the American requests even further into some of their constituent parts. The company noted that 68 percent of the American requests were subpoenas, 22 percent were warrants, 6 percent were “other court orders,” 2 percent were “pen register orders,” and 1 percent were “emergency disclosure requests.”

Pen registers are a type of legal order that has recently skyrocketed in use in the US. Originally designed to apply to telephone companies, they are now being increasingly applied to tech companies as a way to capture user metadata, too.

Applied to a Google user, a pen register would likely record who that user was sending e-mail to. A corresponding “trap and trace order” would likely include metadata from e-mails received. Secure e-mail service Lavabit recently received such an order prior to its shutdown. As Google defines them, its "pen register orders" also include "trap and trace orders."

"The latest transparency report from Google illustrates the government's steadily growing appetite for more data from more users," Leslie Harris, the Center for Democracy and Technology's president said in a statement. "As our most personal information continues to move online, where physical barriers to government access are diminished, it's vital that our laws are updated to protect against warrantless searches."

UPDATE 11:51am CT: A Google spokesperson, Dorothy Chou, wrote to Ars to clarify the new details that Google has released.

"We began breaking out subpoenas vs. warrants for U.S. requests during our last release of data (July-December 2012). For that data set we had three categories for US criminal requests: subpoenas, warrants and other requests," she said. "The data set we're releasing today (July-December 2013) breaks out the requests formerly categorized as "other" into emergency disclosures, wiretap orders, pen register orders and other court orders."