They don't want you to know they're watching! Twitter demands transparency for government surveillance programs

The social media platform Twitter is suing the U.S. government in an attempt to loosen restrictions on what the company can reveal about national security and related requests by the U.S. government.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The company filed the suit against the Justice Department on October 6, in a northern California federal court.

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The social media giant argued that the restrictions imposed on them by the federal government which make them unable to disclose how many national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court orders they receive is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

The company's vice president, Ben Lee, said in a blog post that Twitter is suing in an effort to publish a full version of a "transparency report" it had prepared earlier this year which included these details.

"It's our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users' concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance-including what types of legal process have not been received," Lee wrote. "We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges."

Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce fired back, referring to similar lawsuit brought against the department by other tech companies, like Google.

"Earlier this year, the government addressed similar concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by several major tech companies," she said. "There, the parties worked collaboratively to allow tech companies to provide broad information on government requests while also protecting national security."

Numerous critics of the government's surveillance activities applauded Twitter's suit.

Deputy legal director for the ACLU, Jameel Jaffer, said that "challenging this tangled web of secrecy rules and gag orders" was the right move. He urged other tech firms to follow Twitter's lead.

"If these laws prohibit Twitter from disclosing basic information about government surveillance, then these laws violate the First Amendment," he said. "The Constitution doesn't permit the government to impose so broad a prohibition on the publication of truthful speech about government conduct."

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