Twitter may not publicly detail to the degree it wants the number of times the FBI demands user information from it for national security investigations, a federal appellate court ruled Monday.
Twitter may not publicly quantify the number of times the FBI demands user information from it for national security investigations, a federal appellate court ruled Monday.
“This ruling is really undermining those 1st Amendment protections for anyone who gets swept up in a super-secret government investigation,” said Andrew Crocker, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had filed a brief in support of Twitter. In response, the U.S. government agreed to allow companies to release information about the number of information requests they had received, but with limits. The government said the companies could report only the number of requests in “bands” of 1,000. That is, companies could report receiving zero and 999 such orders, but could not provide more detail or specify the exact number of requests they’d received.
Twitter officials wanted to say how many of each sort of request it had received from the government by increments not of 1,000, but of 25 — that is, that it had received between 1 and 25 such requests, or between 25 and 50. They also wanted to be able to say whether the company had received no such requests.
The government disagreed, though the details of its arguments were obscured because they were filed under seal. The reason: government officials said they included classified information. Action by the government to block publication of material in advance — known as “prior restraint” — is subject to the strictest legal standard of review, given the sanctity of the 1st Amendment, and it has been rejected in incredibly important cases in the past, Crocker said.
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