Twitter: FBI forced it to reveal data on two users

Twitter disclosed on Friday that the FBI had issued the tech company two national security letters accompanied by gag orders in the past two years.

In a blog post on Twitter’s website, Elizabeth Banker, an associate general counsel for the company, published both national security requests, redacted to hide the identities of the users being probed as well as law enforcement officials.

The FBI’s letters ordered the social media company to provide the name, address, length of service and records of message transactions of the specific users. The letters added, however, that Twitter should not turn over the contents of any communications.

{mosads}“We’re encouraged by the lifting of these two gag orders and those recently disclosed by Cloudflare, Google, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo,” Banker wrote. 

“However, Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive.”

Twitter filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department in 2014 in an attempt to free itself of gag orders placed on the company regarding national security probes of its users. When announcing the lawsuit, Twitter noted that it was prohibited from disclosing to the public how many security letters it had received.