Feds secretly forced Twitter to disclose a user's identity — twice

Twitter revealed late Friday that it had provided user information to the U.S. government in a situation that was a matter of national security. It now was able to explain, as previous gag orders were recently lifted by the FBI, that the situation happened twice.

The San Francisco-based company had been issued national security letters, accompanied by "gag orders," which therefore prevented the company from telling the public and the affected users about its existence prior.

While Twitter followed the orders, the company took to its blog to publicly share its discontent and pointed to its effort to combat such practices in the government.

Twitter, like other companies in the tech industry, must be at odds with the government over providing user information. Cloudflare and Google published recently published redacted versions of national security letters they had received.

In the blog post titled "#Transparency update: Twitter discloses national security letters," Twitter explained its work in it and linked-out to PDF files of its own redacted letters.

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The redacted versions of the letters reveal the location and timing, but do not out the users. The first came from Michelle Klimt, an FBI agent in Jacksonville, Florida, on September 2015 and asked for information about a user's account, starting from Dec. 1, 2014. Michael Anderson, an FBI agent in Houston, Texas, sent the other letter in June 2016 and requested all available information.

Twitter said that the letters had requested a "large amount of data," but Twitter provided a "very limited set," what was required by federal law, according to the blog post.

Both letters requested the user's names, addressed and “electronic communications transactional records for all services." Not all Twitter accounts are public.

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Tech companies have taken issue with the government's practices and worked to notify users. Back in 2010, Google published its first "transparency report" that identified, as much as it could, about government requests. Since then, Twitter, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo have released biannual reports.

Twitter took this opportunity Friday to reiterate its commitment to #transparency and its effort in the courts.

"Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive. We continue to push for the legal ability to speak more openly on this topic in our lawsuit against the U.S. government," Twitter's Elizabeth Banker, associate general counsel of global law enforcement, wrote in the blog post.

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"We continue to believe that reporting in government-mandated bands does not provide meaningful transparency to the public or those using our service," she continued.

The lawsuit, Twitter v. Lynch, challenges the government's refusal of the company to publish more granular information about national security requests.

As Twitter explained in its blog post, "the government argues that any numerical reporting more detailed than the bands in the USA Freedom Act would be classified and as such not protected by the First Amendment."

Twitter said Friday the next hearing is Feb. 14.