Twitter sues US government over state surveillance rules

Twitter has filed a lawsuit against the US government, seeking to ease restrictions on public disclosures of how often the company receives requests for user data from government agencies.

The suit charges that in restricting how often companies like Twitter can inform their members of government requests for personal information, some agencies are in violation of 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. "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 upon their services daily. For organisations such as the National Security Agency (NSA), consumer technology companies often hold surveillance data on suspects the agency is tracking. Many of these agencies routinely request user data from these companies as part of continuing investigations.

For years, however, technology companies have been limited by the law as to how much they can publicly disclose to their users about these government requests. That has put companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook in the difficult position of occasionally handing over user data, but not being able to let their members know when doing so.

Google 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 received. Others, like Twitter, soon followed suit. But these companies are no longer content with their current restrictions, and are fighting to share more specific data on the number and types of requests they regularly receive. Last year, in the wake of revelations from a 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 push back in public, seeking to change current rules on data request disclosures.

In December, eight companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft, formed a coalition to lobby President Obama and Congress publicly to set greater restrictions on the breadth of government surveillance. – (New York Times service)