Twitter Inc filed a lawsuit against the US government on Tuesday, seeking to ease restrictions on public disclosures of how often the company receives requests for user data from federal agencies.
The suit, which makes Twitter the lone big technology company to continue the disclosure fight in federal court, charges that in restricting how often companies like Twitter can inform their members of government requests for personal information, the government is violating users’ First Amendment rights.
“We’ve tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail,” said Ben Lee, a vice president for legal matters at Twitter, in a company blog post.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of US government officials by providing information about the scope of US government surveillance,” he said.
The move is the latest in a long push-and-pull battle between the US government and the technology companies that hold information on the billions of people who rely on their services daily. Many of the agencies routinely request user data from the companies as part of continuing investigations.
In response, Google Inc began a practice of issuing a so-called biannual transparency report, which gave the public a broad range of the number of government requests for user data the company had received. Others, like Twitter, soon followed suit.
However, those companies are no longer content with their current restrictions and are seeking to share more specific data on the number and types of requests they regularly receive.
Public interest watchdog groups were quick to applaud Twitter for continuing to press for more disclosures.
“Technology companies have an obligation to protect their customers’ sensitive information against overbroad government surveillance and to be candid with their customers about how their information is being used and shared,” American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said. “We hope that other technology companies will now follow Twitter’s lead.”
Last year, after revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government had been in close contact with tech companies for surveillance purposes, a number of the largest Silicon Valley companies began to resist publicly, seeking to change current rules on data request disclosures.
In December, eight companies, including Apple Inc, Google and Microsoft Corp, formed a coalition to lobby US President Barack Obama and Congress publicly to set greater restrictions on the breadth of government surveillance.
To date, they have made some headway. The coalition of companies — known as Reform Government Surveillance — settled with the Justice Department in January.
In the terms of that settlement, the new rules allow companies to disclose how many data requests they have received from the government in groups of 1,000.
Twitter, however, opted not to participate in that agreement.
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