Twitter has sued the U.S. Department of Justice in a move to expand the amount of data it can share with users about what type of requests for information it receives from the government.
The company argued that a restriction on disclosing the number of National Security Letters and orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. In Twitter’s view, it should be able to reveal what sorts of legal processes have been used, and what types of requests it has not received.
“It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance – including what types of legal process have not been received,” Ben Lee, the Vice President in charge of Twitter’s Legal department said in a blog post. “We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges.”
Right now, companies can only report requests in particular ranges. Those start from 0-249 if a company wants to group all the requests together in a bunch, or 0-999 if companies want to break them out by category.
It’s an important fight for Twitter, which is fighting to gain users around the world, and has positioned itself as a place for people to go and discuss political events like protests. Since much of the content shared on the social network is public, law enforcement agencies shouldn’t need to make as many requests for data from Twitter as they would from Facebook, or other service providers.
If Twitter can point out how few requests it receives, that could attract more interest from political dissidents in the future.
This lawsuit is another salvo in a longstanding fight between technology companies and the DoJ over how much they can disclose about the requests they receive. Following revelations about the breadth of government surveillance from Edward Snowden, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are facing increased scrutiny from customers, especially when it comes to handling government requests for their data.
For its part, the government has argued that it needs to maintain secrecy around the number of requests for intelligence and law enforcement purposes. Officials have claimed that revealing the number of requests would harm investigations from agencies like the FBI.
Twitter’s full complaint is embedded below.
