Twitter Sues the Government for Violating Its First Amendment Rights

Twitter just sued the federal government over restrictions the government places on how much the company can disclose about surveillance requests it receives.

For months, Twitter has tried to negotiate with the government to expand the kind of information that it and other companies are allowed to disclose. But it failed. Today, Twitter asserts in its suit that preventing the company from telling users how often the government submits national security requests for user data is a violation of the First Amendment.

The move goes a step beyond a challenge filed by Google and other companies last year that also sought permission on First Amendment grounds to disclose how often it receives national security requests for data. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks about government spying and the so-called PRISM program, the companies sought to add statistics about national security requests to transparency reports that some of them were already publishing. Up to that point, the reports had revealed only the number of general law enforcement requests for data that the companies received each year, not so-called National Security Letters the companies received for data or other national security requests submitted with a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

The companies asserted that without the ability to disclose more details about the data requests they received, the public was left to speculate wildly that they were providing unfettered access to user data or giving the government information in bulk. If the public knew how few requests for data they actually received, they argued, people would be re-assured that this was not the case.

[G]overnment nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation, Googles Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in a letter to the attorney general and FBI. Googles numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.

Although the companies won a partial victory in negotiation when the government agreed earlier this year to let them publish broad statistics about national security requests they received, the statistics turned out to be nothing more than a coy tease. They provided no real transparency. The companies were only allowed to publish a range of the requests they received. For example, they were only allowed to disclose that they had received between 0 and 999 national security requests for data. They also had a six-month delay imposed on them, prohibiting them from disclosing certain sets of information, and a two-year delay for disclosing other sets of data.

In August, Google and Microsoft pressed for the right to release more statistics, including a breakdown of the number of requests specifically targeting user content, versus requests seeking metadata.

Twitter was not part of the legal challenges filed by the other companies but engaged in its own battle for more transparency. Last April, the company submitted a draft of the kind of transparency report it sought to make public.

Twitter sought, among other things, to narrow the scope for reporting statistics. Instead of reporting requests in a range of 0 to 999, it wanted to be able to report actual aggregate numbers for the number of NSL and FISA orders it received and to be able to break down, in smaller batches, each type of request. For example, it wanted to be able to report the number of NSLs and FISA orders it received in a range of 1-99.

The Justice Department responded in September that the proposed report contained classified informationwithout specifying which part of the information was classifiedthat could not be publicly released under the current FISA and National Security Letter laws. These statutes come with a gag order preventing service providers from disclosing the data requests they receive.

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Twitter Sues the Government for Violating Its First Amendment Rights