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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."
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.
... 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! --
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".
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why does the government object? After all, it's only metadata.