It's worth reading the brief.
I dont get something. Any US agency can actually request data from google, dropbox, facebook, etc WITHOUT a warrant or some sort of judicial approval? Is it really that bad? For example the FBI can come to mk house tomorrow and ask for any data concerning u/TheAdvancedApe, and mk can be prosecuted if he refuse?
And No, not any US agency can request information from private telecoms without a warrant. Based on my understanding it seems likely that NSA can search when they please. The CIA, FBI, and armed forces probably can access for sensitive issues, but it may not be widespread. I highly doubt that smaller, less powerful or less interesting agencies get access to this information without a warrant. Just for the record I find this to be a gross abuse of our personal liberties and our right to be free from unnecessary search and seizure. It has to change and I think the best most practical thing we can do is email our representatives and express our rightful outrage. If you do not hear back or hear a defense of such searches follow up by promptly voting them out of office.
The statistics in this report as well as most statistics that google or facebook would publish are probably related to run of the mill warrants. Picture a suspicious death is under investigation and the police want to check someone's private messages for clues. In dropbox's case they could be investigating child pornography or sharing copyrighted data. I actually think it's more likely that if any of the above organizations were served a request from the FISA court they would be obliged to not even publish the request in a total summary of stats.
I am not sure if they need a secret FISA court approval for these requests, but apparently no request to the court has been denied. It is very bad. What is worse, the constitutionality of these actions haven't been successfully considered in a real court, because in order to bring a case against the government, an individual needs to be able to prove that harm has been done to them. Due to the secretive nature of these programs, this barrier hasn't been successfully overcome in a case to get to court. I am almost certain that if this gets to the Supreme court, this behavior will be severely restricted, but I am not certain that it will get there. We were talking last night about implementing something like this, but I suspect that it will be worthless. They are not going to just throw up their hands and give up if you try to be clever.
Part of the problem is that the internet is new enough in the mainstream that we haven't sorted out a lot of these issues, especially those regarding secretive agencies (like mk pointed out) where it's tough to prove harm or influence. I'm pretty sure that will all change the moment this hits our current Supreme Court, but that could be a little while.
Dropbox, just like any cloud service, provides convenience of data storage and access. Personally, I'll keep using my hard drives for as long as computers ship with them.