Commentary

Twitter Fights For Right To Disclose Info About NSA Requests

Earlier this year the U.S. government settled a lawsuit brought by six Web companies by allowing them to publish some aggregate information about the number of requests they receive for data about consumers.

The tech companies -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIn -- agreed that they wouldn't state the precise number of government requests. Instead, they agreed to disclose only broad ranges of numbers, within bands of 1,000. For instance, companies agreed to say that they received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters within a six-month time period, as opposed to stating the precise number.

But not all of the big service companies agreed to those terms. Most notably, Twitter was absent from the list of tech companies to settle with the government.

Today, the microblogging service said that it is challenging those settlement terms as an attack on freedom of speech. “These restrictions constitute an unconstitutional prior restraint and content-based restriction on, and government viewpoint discrimination against, Twitter’s right to speak about information of national and global public concern,” the company says in a motion for declaratory judgment, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The company says in its court papers that it showed a draft of a proposed “transparency report” to the government in April. Last month, the authorities notified Twitter that they rejected that version of the report because it didn't comply with the bands-of-thousands system that the other Web companies agreed to follow.

Twitter now argues that the government has no right to insist on that format, given that the company wasn't involved in the earlier lawsuit or settlement. “Twitter is entitled under the First Amendment to respond to its users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing more complete information about the limited scope of U.S. government surveillance of Twitter user accounts -- including what types of legal process have not been received by Twitter,” the company says in its legal papers.

This isn't the first time that Twitter has stood up to the government. In 2011, Twitter alone among Web platforms challenged a secret government subpoena for information about account holders who appeared to have ties to Wikileaks. The following year, the company drew praise from digital rights advocates for appealing a court order requiring it to disclose data about an Occupy Wall Street protester.

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