A federal judge on Monday dismissed an effort by Twitter to toss out gag orders placed on the company over classified surveillance.
“The First Amendment does not permit a person subject to secrecy obligations to disclose classified national security information,” California Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in the dismissal. “Twitter has conceded that the aggregate data is classified. In the absence of a challenge to the decisions classifying that information, Twitter’s constitutional challenges simply do not allege viable claims.”
Twitter filed the suit in 2014, alleging that the company’s First Amendment rights were being violated over National Security Letters. Those documents are used by the FBI to demand that companies hand over information about their users, and can include information like web browsing histories.
They come with an automatic gag order that prevents companies from disclosing much information about their usage.
Twitter did win a partial victory. The judge did not agree with the government that the case should have been handled by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court responsible for authorizing the orders, and said that the information had not been “properly classified” by the government.
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That venue victory gives Twitter the option of appealing the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the company stands a better chance of arguing that the classified information should be handled differently. “We will continue to evaluate today’s order, but we welcome the decision not to transfer our transparency case to the FISA Court,” Twitter said in a statement.
An annual report released by the intelligence community on Monday found that the surveillance court approved 100 percent of the requests made by intelligence agencies in 2015.
