A recent agreement between tech companies Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo and the Justice Department provided that these companies would be allowed to disclose when certain national security forces – such as those acting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – required the tech giants to turn over information related to their users. Now, the social media company Twitter has announced that it is ready to sue the Obama administration for the right to disclose information related to government surveillance requests targeting Twitter users.
Twitter’s global legal policy chief, Jeremy Kessel, insisted that the agreement with the tech companies did not go far enough, and that the privacy protections that Twitter attempted to provide for its users would continue to unfairly suffer as a result. Kessel noted, “We think the government’s restriction on our speech not only unfairly impacts our users’ privacy, but also violates our First Amendment right to free expression and open discussion of government affairs . . . . Therefore, we have pressed the U.S. Department of Justice to allow greater transparency, and proposed future disclosures concerning national security requests that would be more meaningful to Twitter’s users. We are also considering legal options we may have to seek to defend our First Amendment rights.” Kessel also indicated that Twitter wanted the freedom to report which types of government information requests that it did not receive to instill a greater sense of privacy in its users.
Twitter has received a steadily increasing number of governmental requests for user information over the last two years. Though most of these requests have come from the U.S. government, Twitter indicated that 45 different countries have asked it for user information since 2012, requests that affect roughly 6,400 Twitter accounts.
In response, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced that the administration may begin disclosing some previously classified government information requests, stating, “While this aggregate data was properly classified until today, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with other departments and agencies, has determined that the public interest in disclosing this information now outweighs the national security concerns that required its classification.”
Still, the current disclosure guidelines require Twitter to reveal government disclosure requests in a very broad way – a way that Twitter believes is more obscure than helpful. If a lawsuit resulted it seems like that Twitter would fight to change these requires as well; Kessel noted, “For the disclosure of national security requests to be meaningful to our users, it must [ ] provide[ ] sufficient precision to be meaningful.”
Twitter Threatens to Sue Obama Administration Over Gov’t Surveillance Requests