Supreme Court won’t hear case over FBI national security demands of X 

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from X, formerly known as Twitter, seeking to make public the number of times the FBI requested user information from the company in connection with national security investigations. 

The social media company sued the government in 2014, during the Obama administration, after it was blocked from publishing the quantity of requests in its biannual online “Transparency Report,” claiming the government unlawfully restrained its speech.  

In its petition to the high court, X argued it’s critical to make the standards for discussing the extent of governmental surveillance “clear, settled and constitutionally adequate.” 

“History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public,” X wrote.  

The government’s arguments were largely filed under seal due to the inclusion of classified information. 

Two lower federal courts ruled that the FBI rightfully barred the publication of the data to protect national security.  

A federal district court in 2020 ruled that the government’s classification decision was justified and that “no more narrow tailoring of the restrictions can be made.” 

In March, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, with Circuit Judge Daniel Bress, a President Trump appointee, writing that the government’s redactions of the Transparency Report were “narrowly tailored in support of the compelling government interest in national security.”

Bress also said the government’s classified declarations spelled out the importance of keeping confidential the number and frequency of intelligence requests made to social media platforms such as X.  

“Against the fuller backdrop of these explicit illustrations of the threats that exist and the ways in which the government can best protect its intelligence resources, we are able to appreciate why Twitter’s proposed disclosure would risk making our foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled—if anything at all,” he wrote.