Twitter releases two illegal data requests made by FBI
These national security letters violated a 2008 US Justice Department memo that had limited such orders to phone billing records.
Twitter has published two surveillance order requests made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Experts told Reuters that the investigative agency had overstepped the scope of legal guidance to seek the internet records by issuing national security letters. Twitter, which released the order requests on Friday, is the third company to do so after Google and Yahoo.
The social media network said it did not hand over all the information that the FBI sought. “Twitter provides a very limited set of data in response to NSLs consistent with federal law and interpretive guidance from the US Department of Justice,” the company’s Associate General Counsel Elizabeth Banker wrote in a blog.
In 2015 and 2016, the FBI had issued two national security letters requesting Twitter to share a few records of electronic communication. The data sought included information on email header and browsing history. In 2008, the US Department of Justice had said that such NSLs should be limited to phone billing records.
The letters are government orders to seek communications data from service providers. These can be issued without informing the person whose data is being accessed.