The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by Elon Musk's Company X to consider whether federal law enforcement agencies can publicly disclose how often they request information about users for national security investigations.
Justices decline to hear X's appeal of a lower court's ruling that the FBI's restrictions on what the company can publicly say about its investigation do not violate its First Amendment right to free speech. did.
Mr. said.
“History has shown that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a hotbed for government abuse and a political lightning rod of great public concern,” X's lawyers wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court. I mentioned it in.
“It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court has refused to hear this matter,” Musk said in a post on X.
The long-running lawsuit comes after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the scope of U.S. spying and surveillance operations in 2013, long before Musk took over Twitter in 2022. It happened in 2014.
In response to public outcry over the revelations from Snowden's leaks, the U.S. government has made public information about the data it holds at the request of tech companies including Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook owner Metaplatforms. They agreed to ease restrictions on what can be done. Searched in connection with a national security investigation.
The revised policy, announced in 2014, allows companies to disclose broader information about how often they receive requests for national security information, rather than exact numbers.
Congress enacted a law in 2015 that allows companies to disclose limited information about how often they receive so-called national security letters or orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requesting user data. However, they were still able to do so only in broad ranges and not in exact numbers. Depending on the type of report issued, a company may disclose as few as 100 government data requests and as many as 1,000.
In its lawsuit, Twitter, then known as
Before filing the lawsuit, he submitted a draft report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the FBI concluded that the information in the report was classified and could not be released.
A trial judge dismissed Twitter's lawsuit, and a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in March 2023, ruling that “Twitter's speech “Government restrictions on the United States are narrowly tailored to support compelling government interests.” ”
