The Justice Department has agreed to relax its long-standing gag order on certain types of sensitive data requests made to companies, allowing them for the first time to publicize...how often they must furnish customer information to the government...The agreement, made in response to legal challenges from Google, Microsoft and other technology companies, comes as part of President Obama’s effort to ease the secrecy around government intelligence-gathering in the aftermath of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The new policy will allow companies to report on national security letters, a form of administrative subpoena, as well as on requests from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They will only be permitted, however, to disclose the volume of requests in wide numerical ranges...Companies will also be able to disclose, in similar broad ranges, how many customer accounts are affected...The companies that waged the legal fight for more disclosure issued a joint statement Monday saying: “We filed our lawsuits because we believe that the public has a right to know about the volume and types of national security requests we receive...While this is a very positive step, we’ll continue to encourage Congress to take additional steps to address all of the reforms we believe are needed.” [Other companies involved in lawsuit include Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!]