The Supreme Court rejected a long-running legal challenge by Company X, formerly known as Twitter, over whether it can publicly disclose U.S. government requests for user data. X Corp. v. Garland is among the list of dismissed petitions released this morning. Civil liberties groups said the ruling set a disappointingly low bar for review.
Twitter filed the original lawsuit in 2014, the year after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed details of widespread covert U.S. telecommunications surveillance. After those disclosures, the social network won the option to report how many requests agencies like the FBI made, but only in very broad terms due to government confidentiality requirements. Twitter sought to release the exact number of requests it received over a six-month period, arguing that the redactions requested by the FBI overstepped the First Amendment.
Courts have mostly disagreed. In March, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that "Twitter has a First Amendment interest in commenting on matters of public concern involving national security subpoenas" but that its request "risks letting foreign adversaries know what is and is not being monitored."
The American Civil Liberties Union called the decision "disappointing and dangerous," arguing that "not only does the panel's decision conflict with decades of Supreme Court precedent, but its reasoning threatens to impose broad restrictions on speech about our interactions with the government."
The company was then owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who also argued to the Supreme Court that it would "substantially erode" previous First Amendment precedent.
Before Musk, Twitter was involved in numerous legal actions around the world over government-requested removals and surveillance, and the Supreme Court ruled on at least one of them: In Twitter v. Taamneh, the Supreme Court held that the social network did not aid and abet terrorists by failing to ban their accounts. Twitter, meanwhile, has been embroiled in a battle against state-level internet regulation, although it has also sued to legally suppress criticism of the platform. Meanwhile, Congress recently delayed reauthorizing key parts of the U.S. surveillance apparatus - leaving a heated debate to take place later this year.