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."

Comments

good for them

[sribe]

It's nice to see rich and powerful corporations starting to stand up and oppose these abuses...

Re:good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame the people who made those corporations rich and powerful can't say the same.

How many people visiting Slashdot have a Facebook account, I wonder? Anyone who does is only contributing to the surveillance state, not helping to disarm it. All of these social media sites make their money on tracking users in the first place...wonder why an Android tablet is a few hundred bucks cheaper sometimes than a similar iPad? It would be tempting to chalk that off to Apple simply marking up the prices out of brand name recognition...and that might well be correct for all I know. However, I somehow suspect, judging by the amount of "sync everything to our servers" options I have to disable before I even _use_ an Android tablet, it has more to do with Google being the corporate whore of the NSA and similar agencies. "Do no evil" apparently doesn't include "selling your online, personal history to defense contractors, hostile foreign governments and whoever else rattles the most gold and jewelry for them."

Re:good for them

[Just Some Guy]

What's funny is you believe they are doing it for US.

What's funny is you think I care. The abuses cost them money, either directly by requiring additional technical and administrative support or indirectly by driving away customers (like "no way I'm using Foo if the government is tapping right into their data center"). They don't like to lose money so they fight it. You and I benefit from the fight.

I don't care if their motivation is altruism or greed, as long as it gets them off their butts to protest. If I had to choose an effective motivator, I'd probably side with greed as it's a lot more trustworthy. When $megacorp says "we're doing this because we love you and want to protect you!", run quickly. When they say "we're doing this because those assholes in DC are costing us profit", there's a very good chance that they're being perfectly honest.

Re:good for them

[Frosty Piss]

It's nice to see rich and powerful corporations starting to stand up and oppose these abuses...

Oh please.

They understand that this whole "National Security Letter" thing is a threat to their business model. It's all about money.

But having said that, if it works to my benefit, I'm all for it, I certainly can't afford to sue the government for my privacy, and the EFF is ineffective in just about everything they do.

So money it is! Go for it, Twitter...

Just because it's Unconstitutional and Illegal

[WillAffleckUW]

... 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.

Re:Just because it's Unconstitutional and Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it has been happening for a long time does not mean that it should not be changed. Just because you see something as not being as unconstitutional as something else does not mean it should not be changed.

Anything but the number

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re: Anything but the number

[zeugma-amp]

The layers of secrecy the government surrounds itself with these days is astounding. It gets continually worse every single year. A government that shrouds itself in such secrecy can scarcely call itself legitimate. There are legitimate reasons for secrcy, but we passed the bounds of reasonableness long, long ago.