Twitter Sues U.S. Government Over Data Disclosure Rules

Twitter filed a lawsuit against the United States government on Tuesday, seeking to ease restrictions on public disclosures of how often the company receives requests for user data from government agencies.

The suit, which makes Twitter the lone big tech company to continue the disclosure fight with federal agencies, charges that in restricting how often companies like Twitter can inform their members of government requests for personal information, the government is in violation of users’ First Amendment rights.

“We’ve tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail,” said Ben Lee, a vice president for legal matters at Twitter, in a company blog post.

“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,” he said.

The move is the latest in a long push-and-pull battle between the United States government and the technology companies that hold information on the billions of people who rely upon their services daily.

For organizations like the National Security Agency, consumer technology companies often hold surveillance data on suspects the agency is tracking. Many of these agencies routinely request user data from these companies as part of continuing investigations.

For years, however, technology companies have been limited by the law as to how much they can publicly disclose to their users about these government requests. That has put companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook in the difficult position of occasionally handing over user data, but not being able to let their members know when doing so.

Google began a practice of issuing a so-called biannual transparency report, which gave the public a broad range of the number of government requests for user data the company received. Others, like Twitter, soon followed suit.

But these companies are no longer content with their current restrictions, and are fighting to share more specific data on the number and types of requests they regularly receive.

Public interest watchdog groups were quick to applaud Twitter for its tactics.

“Technology companies have an obligation to protect their customers’ sensitive information against overbroad government surveillance, and to be candid with their customers about how their information is being used and shared,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. “We hope that other technology companies will now follow Twitter’s lead.”

Last year, in the wake of revelations from a former N.S.A. contractor, Edward J. Snowden, that the government had been in close contact with tech companies for surveillance purposes, a number of the largest Silicon Valley companies began to push back in public, seeking to change current rules on data request disclosures.

In December, eight companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft, formed a coalition to lobby President Obama and Congress publicly to set greater restrictions on the breadth of government surveillance.

To date, they have made some headway. The coalition of companies — known as “Reform Government Surveillance” — settled with the Department of Justice in January.

“Earlier this year, the government addressed similar concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by several major tech companies,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice said in a statement. “There, the parties worked collaboratively to allow tech companies to provide broad information government requests while also protecting national security.”

In the terms of that settlement, the new rules allow for companies to disclose how many data requests they have received from the government in groups of 1,000.

Twitter, however, opted not to participate in that agreement.