Last week, Twitter sued the US Justice Department for its ban on detailing the scope of its surveillance activities, claiming unconstitutional prior restraint under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Specifically, Twitter is opposing gag orders accompanying National Security Letters (NSL) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) orders.
Twitter’s lawsuit filing against the US Department of Justice regarding its use of gag orders.
Initially, when Edward Snowden disclosed the classified documents outlining the US government’s domestic electronic surveillance activities, observers mistakenly believed tech companies had given the US National Security Agency (NSA) unfettered and total access to their systems under the 702 program. The 702 program is so named because of the plethora of demands for information by the NSA under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act.
A number of those tech companies — not including Twitter — filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department arguing they had a right under the First Amendment to disclose the number of these orders they were receiving. The lawsuit was settled earlier this year with the Justice Department agreeing that the companies could disclose extremely limited information about the orders in “bands” of 1,000 individual targets.