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Twitter Sues US Government Over National Security Data Requests
mpicpp sends news that Twitter is suing the U.S. government to fight their rules on what information can be shared about national security-related requests for user data. Service providers like Twitter are prohibited from telling us the exact number of National Security Letters and FISA court orders they've received. Google has filed a challenge based on First Amendment rights, and Twitter's lawsuit (PDF) is taking a similar approach. Twitter VP Ben Lee says, "We've tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail. In April, we provided a draft Transparency Report addendum to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a report which we hoped would provide meaningful transparency for our users. After many months of discussions, we were unable to convince them to allow us to publish even a redacted version of the report."
That pesky supreme court decision.
It's nice to see rich and powerful corporations starting to stand up and oppose these abuses...
Including names of all agents, cowards, morons or whatever they are called, "working" for the government.
Just say the documents must have been stolen or something. It's not like the government can say very much when their most secret of all secret agencies didn't manage to stop similar things from happening.
Perhaps they shall destroy one another.
... doesn't mean the NSA won't do it.
By the way, have they admitted they've been tapping all your phone calls beyond the local exchange since the 70s yet?
All of them. Everywhere.
Inside the USA.
And you're worried about Facebook.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Have you tried leaking it?
Can't tell you that. But we've bought 200 replacement pet canaries this year.
Have gnu, will travel.
tweet it?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Wont someone please post about censorship in china to divert attention away from problems at home?
The degree of secrecy demanded correlates directly with how unethical the surveillance is.
If it was limited in scope, with the targeted individuals having a real national security rationale for observation, there would be little necessity for the secrecy. The public reaction might be on the order of suspicion that a search warrant's criteria wasn't really present, but that isn't an intensity of response that is really problematic for the government.
It's specifically the concealed scale of the surveillance that is clearly most pertinent, and hidden by dire government threat.
If the interests of the citizens were what was of concern here, we would see little secrecy around the number of inquiries, and much more concern about specifics about the individual inquiries, ostensibly hidden to protect citizens' legal and privacy rights. Instead, we see the precise opposite. The broad -number- is what's obscured and made secret at every opportunity, while the specific targeted data and the legal actions taken from them (i.e. their actual usefulness for legitimate purposes) is an afterthought in terms of government suppression. This inversion alone should be enough to make clear whose "interests" these programs are intended to "secure".
imagine the achievement of suing the Fed in 160 chars.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
The Twitter blog entry cited says that they are prevented from revealing the number of NSL & FISA orders received even if that number is zero. The text of the lawsuit explains that under the terms of the settlement in January between the government and Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! (laid down in what the lawsuit calls the Deputy Attorney General's letter (PDF), companies are allowed to give either the numbers of NSL & FISA orders received and accounts affected but only in bands of 1000, of which the first is 0-999, or the total number of orders received in bands of 250, starting with 0-249. Is that what killed Apple's warrant canary?
... more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive." According to Twitter's last transparency report, there were 1257 information requests from law enforcement in the US, covering 1918 accounts. Does this suggest that Twitter receive about the same number of NSL & FISA orders?
Twitter want to publish more specific numbers, including zero. They say that "The DAG Letter cites to no authority for these restrictions on service providers’ speech" and argue that anyway the settlement doesn't apply to them.
A previous blog entry says Twitter want "to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be
1) burn the letter
2) reply with a request for a warrant
3) if any NSA scum show up without a warrant and barge in just shoot them for breaking and entering
problem solved
Why does the government object? After all, it's only metadata.
The current situation in the United States, strongly parallels the situation that existed in East Germany, except surveillance in the United States is far more invasive, and pervasive. At least someone is taking some kind of stand against the criminal activity of the regime. The persecution of whistle blowers who exposed many of the crimes that have been committed by the US regime is even more worrying. In the past, it would have been expected that their would be congressional hearings, criminal charges against those responsible, long prison sentences, and probably corrupt pardons for the most senior officials (eg. the president), in typical US style. This time though, government in the United States seems to see no need to preserve the illusion of democracy - not that that illusion looks very credible, these days. The gloves are off, and a brutal and repressive regime that arms its ordinary police forces with RVs and automatic weapons, is making clear its willingness to crack the skulls of any opponents. What can an ordinary American do but despair. The majority of the mass media won't rock the boat, there is no way to vote the regime out. The deeply entrenched and utterly corrupt single party government continues to widen the wealth gap, as it pursues a kind of reverse socialism, where it redistributes majority wealth to the richest 0.1%. At the same time, just like the Nazis in Germany, the regime uses the excuse of 'national security', and the usual fearmongering of 'terrorism', to justify attacking people's civil liberties, and launching brutal, bloody, and totally worthless military campaigns abroad. What an utterly vile country America has become.
If filthy Monsanto can sue State of Vermont over "GMO" food labelling, on grounds that this violates Monsanto's freedom of speech (yes, am still working that one out), then it's in Twitter's god damn right to sue the US government over its constant abuse of people's private life! It's like asking someone to stop raping you but that someone enacted laws to legalise rape. This is what's going on in the US today!
Clearly, the solution is to send the fully unredacted report to every Twitter employee, and tell them not to leak the document.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
That's why you avoid non-FLOSS US based software like plague...
visited http://thegioibaoho.com OR http://thegioibaoho.com.vn