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Twitter threatens to sue Obama administration over government surveillance requests

“Twitter says it is prepared to sue the Obama administration for the right to disclose more details about government surveillance requests,” Julian Hattem reports for The Hill.

“In a blog post on Thursday, the head of global legal policy for the micro-blogging website said a recent agreement between tech groups and the Justice Department did not go far enough to address the company’s concerns,” Hattem reports. “‘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,’ Jeremy 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.'”

“Companies have said that consumers around the world trust them less because they don’t know the extent to which they are handing information over to the government,” Hattem reports. “Twitter did not release information about the national security requests it had received. It has seen a steady increase in the number of other government requests about users’ accounts it has received in the last two years, it said.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take:

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]

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