Twitter may sue US government over right to disclose snooping orders

  • 9 February 2014
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Current compromise not 'meaningful'

By Iain Thomson, 7th February 2014 Twitter says that the current compromise allowing tech companies to disclose some of the data requests orders made in secret by the US intelligence services isn't good enough, and it may sue to get the right to be more transparent.
 
"We think the government’s restriction on our speech not only unfairly impacts our users' privacy, but also violates our First Amendment right to free expression and open discussion of government affairs," wrote Jeremy Kessel, Twitter's manager for global legal policy, in a blog post on Thursday.
 "We believe there are far less restrictive ways to permit discussion in this area while also respecting national security concerns," Kessel wrote. "Therefore, we have pressed the U.S. Department of Justice to allow greater transparency, and proposed future disclosures concerning national security requests that would be more meaningful to Twitter's users. We are also considering legal options we may have to seek to defend our First Amendment rights."
 
Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and others sued the US government for the right to disclose when its customer data was accessed by the NSA and others after contractor Edward Snowden made the existence of wide-scale snooping public with a series of leaked documents.
 
 
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The following article is a update on US Government Snooping

(To Combat Government Snooping, Encrypt Data Before Putting It In Cloud, Says Interop Speaker)

By Sara Peters Posted on 10/3/2014
 
INTEROP NEW YORK -- Using cloud services allows your organization to hand off "the basic blocking and tackling" of securing an infrastructure, but it also allows a cloud service provider to hand your organization's data to the government, said Elad Yoran, CEO of Security Growth Partners and an advisory board member for Vaultive, at the Interop conference this week. The solution, he said, is to make sure that the only data a cloud provider can give the government is complete gibberish.
According to Yoran, organizations should encrypt data before it ever enters the cloud and keep the encryption keys themselves, stored elsewhere. (Vaultive sells an appliance for this "encryption-in-use," which sits in the organization's DMZ, encrypting and decrypting data as it passes to and from the cloud server.)   
 
 
DarkReading/ article/ http://www.darkreading.com/to-combat-government-snooping-encrypt-data-before-putting-it-in-cloud-says-interop-speaker/d/d-id/1316303?
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The following articlel is a update
 

(Twitter Sues US to Disclose More on Secret Data Orders)

By AFP on October 08, 2014
 
WASHINGTON - Twitter sued the US government Tuesday, claiming its free speech rights are being violated by restrictions on its ability to disclose numbers of secret orders to hand over user data.
The lawsuit filed in California steps up the battle between the tech sector and US authorities over how much information may be disclosed about vast electronic surveillance in the name of national security.
"It's our belief that we are entitled under the (US constitution's) First Amendment to respond to our users' concerns and to the statements of US government officials by providing information about the scope of US government surveillance -- including what types of legal process have not been received," Twitter vice president Benjamin Lee said in a blog post.
"We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges." Lee said the FBI and Justice Department have refused to allow Twitter to publish any specific numbers in its "transparency report" other than the ranges agreed upon with several other tech firms.
The accord with five major tech companies allows the publication of requests in a range such as zero to 999, or 1,000 to 1,999.
But Twitter, which was not among the five companies in the agreement, said it is not permitted to say whether it has not received any requests from the FBI or secret court.
 
SecurityWeek/ Article/ http://www.securityweek.com/twitter-sues-us-disclose-more-secret-data-orders
 

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