DOJ Wants To Keep Twitter Quiet

Twitter’s court battle against the Justice Department is heating up, with the government seeking to keep the social media network from releasing information it says contains classified details. Twitter sued in 2014 for the right to disclose data on federal requests for user information, saying its First Amendment rights were being infringed. “[T]he interest in secrecy does not last forever, and at some point, release of information about those orders will no longer harm national security,” the company wrote in an amended complaint. Unlike other Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google, and Yahoo, Twitter did not settle with the government by agreeing to disclose the number of government requests in broad ranges, without specific numbers. Twitter is fighting for the right to make public actual aggregate numbers of requests received, and is asking the court to declare it can’t be prosecuted for releasing that data. The Justice Department said in a filing this week that Twitter “can cite no authority in which a person who receives classified information as part of a confidential national security judicial process … has a First Amendment right to publish such information.”