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 The lawsuit, which Twitter said follows months of fruitless
negotiations with the government, marks an escalation in the
Internet industry's battle over government gag orders on the nature
and number of requests for private user information.
In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for Northern
California, Twitter said that current rules prevent it from even
stating that it has not received any national security requests for
user information.
The messaging service said such restrictions violate the
Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
"This is an important issue for anyone who believes in a strong
First Amendment, and we hope to be able to share our complete
transparency report," Twitter said in a blogpost.
Tech companies have sought to clarify their relationships with U.S.
law enforcement and spying agencies in the wake of revelations by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that
outlined the depth of U.S. spying capabilities.
Twitter's lawsuit follows an agreement between Internet companies
like Google Inc and Microsoft Corp with the government about court
orders they receive related to surveillance.
The agreement freed the companies to disclose the number of orders
they received, but only in broad ranges. A company that offers email
services, for example, would be able to say it received between zero
and 999 orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
during a six-month period for email content belonging to someone
outside the United States.
In a separate case, a federal appeals court in San Francisco on
Wednesday will hear arguments on whether the FBI can gag recipients
of national security letters. A lower court judge had ruled those
secrecy guidelines unconstitutional.
CAN'T EVEN DISCLOSE ZERO REQUESTS
Twitter, which allows its 271 million monthly users to send
140-character text messages, has traditionally taken an aggressive
posture challenging government censorship requests and has
previously described itself as "the free-speech wing of the
free-speech party."
The American Civil Liberties Union praised Twitter's action, saying
in a statement that the company was doing the right thing by
"challenging this tangled web of secrecy rules and gag orders."
"The U.S. government has taken the position that service providers
like Twitter are even prohibited from saying that they have received
zero national security requests, or zero of a particular type of
national security request," Twitter said in its complaint.
The Justice Department responded to the lawsuit with a statement on
how it has worked with other companies.
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“Earlier this year, the government addressed similar concerns raised
in a lawsuit brought by several major tech companies," Justice
Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. "There, the parties worked
collaboratively to allow tech companies to provide broad information
on government requests while also protecting national security."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that defends
civil liberties in the digital world, said it had been disappointed
that tech companies had given up their fight.
"EFF and a number of privacy and free-speech organizations expressed
our profound disappointment that the companies dropped their lawsuit
for so little," Nate Cardozo, staff attorney with the group, said on
Tuesday.
The government's restrictions on providing more details about
requests for user data, he said, are "useful for one thing, which is
to keep the public in the dark about what authorities the government
uses to get our data. Twitter's lawsuit said the company has
discussed the matter with the government for months. In a meeting
with officials from the DOJ and the FBI in January, Twitter argued
that it should not be bound by the disclosure limits that the
government offered to Google and the other companies.
It said it submitted a draft transparency report with more detailed
data to the FBI in April, but the agency denied Twitter’s request to
publish the draft five months later.
"We’ve tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve
without litigation, but to no avail," Twitter said in Tuesday's
blogpost. It said it was "asking the court to declare these
restrictions on our ability to speak about government surveillance
as unconstitutional under the First Amendment."
(Additional reporting by San Francisco newsroom; Editing by Leslie
Adler)
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