Twitter sued the FBI and the Ministry of Justice of the United States

Twitter filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI, achieving the right to fully disclose information about what requests for personal data of users come from the authorities. The lawsuit was filed in one of the vessels in the north of California, reports Associated Press.

Otherwise, laws are prohibited by companies to disclose certain information about such requests. In April, Twitter prepared a report on the received requests and his answers to these requests, but officials forbade the companies to publish it completely. Twitter believes that these restrictions violate the first amendment, which guarantees protection of freedom of speech. The purpose of the lawsuit is to achieve greater transparency in the actions of the authorities to collect personal data of Internet users.

"We believe that the first amendment gives us the right to disclose information about the scale of the US government for users for the scale of tracking users," said Twitter lawyer Ben Li. According to him, the authorities talk a lot about how they monitor citizens in order to ensure security, but they do not disclose all the information about their actions and prohibit it to disclose similar information to Internet companies, which can be addressed to personal data requests.

The scale of tracking Internet and telephone users became known from the revelations of the former CIA employee and the US National Security Agency Edward Snowden.

Apple was the first major American company to disclose information about the requests at the device level. In November last year, this company said that in the first half of the year it processed 12,442 requests from 41 countries about the place, time and personal data entered in the activation of the iPhone and iPad. Apple satisfied about three quarters of the requests, including 3110 from the USA, 1856 from Germany, 689 from the UK and 429 from China. The company insisted that the vast majority of requests concerned lost or stolen devices, and there were no cases related to national security at all.