Twitter Sues US Government Over National Security Data Requests 57
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."
Corporations are People too (Score:2)
That pesky supreme court decision.
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Not sure why you would single out Mitt Romney. All politicians are scum.
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He tries harder because he can use his wife's money.
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You joke, but I think this is a serious question. NSLs and associated gag orders are clearly totalitarian and wrong. The Citizen's United decision is wrong -- corporate entities do not have rights. However -- if we assume that corporations do not have first amendment rights, are NSL gag orders unconstitutional or illegal?
One way I can see it is that it is constitutional for the government to prohibit e.g. Twitter from publishing these reports, and Twitter can then do their responsibility under the law in
good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to see rich and powerful corporations starting to stand up and oppose these abuses...
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sadly, reality does not work that way. the system was widely abused.
Of course it was and is. Why do you think they keep it secret from their own citizens (and law-enforcement agencies)?
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Re:good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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...look no further then this key $. Forcing corporations to collect data costs money, lots of it.
Yeah... like they aren't collecting the data anyway for their own marketing uses.
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Re:good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Leak it (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Oh, look, the email server we sent it to you from was compromised. It got out. Darn our luck.
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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.
The government doesn't need to say anything, NSA already kills people based on metadata and without courts or real proof being involved.
You don't go against them and say "You can't prove anything!" They will know who was responsible and whoops, unfortunately you had an accident.
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And that which is not evil will die in the crossfire.
Just because it's Unconstitutional and Illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
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Agreed. The problem is that we always put off the frank discussion of what we actually do, mostly due to Fear.
There are always excuses. But one need not always accept such excuses.
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How is this modded "insightful?" A person with insight would have realized that the technology to do what you're describing didn't exist then.
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Lol, you naive civilian.
You'd like to think so.
Number of Letters (Score:5, Funny)
Can't tell you that. But we've bought 200 replacement pet canaries this year.
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Twitter didn't object to any of them. They objected to not being able to report how many and what type were issued.
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You should never try using something like warrant canaries*. The law says you have to keep the warrant being issued to you a secret. Which covers any way of releasing the information. If you could simply release the information indirectly then all they would have to do to tell someone how many is to just say how many you didn't get. Because then your technically not saying how many you got. Like if you got 1500 secret warrants and then left a post saying "we can't tell you how many we got, but we can say we
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Require all communication from the government(s) go via a dedicated email account, then have a robot tweet ever time an email happen to arrive at that account.
So did they (Score:2)
tweet it?
Anything but the number (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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I remember back in 2007 I told people that they were silly to use facebook as it was a data-mining operation. I was basically told to get a tin-foil hat. I put on the tin
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Huh? Not putting anything on social media that you wouldn't mind telling the FBI is a good practice, but that doesn't mean the government should be going through the data. What is the government supposed to do? Protect our freedoms, actually, and data-mining Twitter limits our freedoms.
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Completely wrong. The narrower the targets of surveillance, the more important it is to the investigation that the targets not know they are being targeted because if they know, they can evade a narrowly targeted search. Knowing doesn't help them evade a broad search nearly as much, so it is less apt to disrupt the investigations if the targets of a broad search know they are being watched -- along with everybody else.
those twitter geniuses... (Score:2)
imagine the achievement of suing the Fed in 160 chars.
Why they can't say zero. (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter want to publish more specific numbers, including zero. They say that "The DAG Letter cites to no authority for these restrictions on service providers’ speech" and argue that anyway the settlement doesn't apply to them.
A previous blog entry [twitter.com] says Twitter want "to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be
Only metadata (Score:5, Funny)
Why does the government object? After all, it's only metadata.
A very important fight against US totalitarianism (Score:1)
The current situation in the United States, strongly parallels the situation that existed in East Germany, except surveillance in the United States is far more invasive, and pervasive. At least someone is taking some kind of stand against the criminal activity of the regime. The persecution of whistle blowers who exposed many of the crimes that have been committed by the US regime is even more worrying. In the past, it would have been expected that their would be congressional hearings, criminal charges aga
Hackers of the world unite? (Score:3)
Leak (Score:2)
Clearly, the solution is to send the fully unredacted report to every Twitter employee, and tell them not to leak the document.