FollowAt the beginning of September we saw a new feature announced by Twitter, the Buy button and today we have the latest Twitter news: it appears that Twitter sued the U.S. Justice Department for the right to reveal surveillance information gathered by the government from their customers to their customers.
Twitter Sued the U.S. Justice Department
It does seem like something out of a spy movie, doesn’t it? A company wants to tell all the dirty secrets of an organization and the organization won’t let it. Well, the organization is, in this case, the U.S. government, and the dirty secrets is their surveillance of Twitter’s clients.
Twitter sued the U.S. Justice Department because it won’t let it tell its customers the amount of information the government has on its users. There are government gag orders that simply do not let the Internet industry reveal information about how much the government is spying on the population through the internet.
Twitter, as well as other Internet companies, aren’t even allowed to say whether or not the government requests security user information. Twitter believes this is a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, the freedom of speech, and hopes to win so that its users know how much they’re being monitored. Twitter said in a statement:
This is an important issue for anyone who believes in a strong First Amendment, and we hope to be able to share our complete transparency report. […] We’ve tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail.
Twitter has around 271 million monthly users and have been known to challenge government censorship requests.
What are your thoughts on the fact that Twitter sued the U.S. Justice Department? Feel free to comment in the section below. We would love to hear from you.
