Pando Daily reports that Twitter is suing the Justice Department for the right to make important disclosures to its customers. 

Twitter is among a handful of US based companies at odds with the government.  In its lawsuit, it seeks to increase the amount of information it can share about the government's requests for data.

There's a financial reason behind the quest for transparency. The US government is not well-trusted around the world and its collection of data from companies such as Verizon, Apple and Google is causing trouble for the companies with foreign governments. They are losing contracts and incurring delays in product releases as foreign governments are disinclined to give the US access to information held by the companies. The lack of transparency is hurting business. 

Twitter sues the Justice Department for the right to be honest with consumers

BY NATHANIEL MOTT

Excerpt:

Twitter has sued the Justice Department in the latest and most drastic of the technology industry’s attempts to gain the right to refute allegations made against companies like Google, Apple, and others as part of the revelation of National Security Agency surveillance programs.

[...]

These companies are desperate to reveal more information about government data requests not because they wish to be transparent — idealism doesn’t get you very far in Silicon Valley — but because their global businesses are threatened by increasing wariness of US-based companies. Their success depends on a global Internet, and as more countries consider splintering off into their own internal Internets or blocking services from US companies, silence is bad business.

Such fears are no longer hypothetical. They’re already affecting companies like Verizon, which lost a German government contract in because it offered data to the NSA, and Apple, which had the release of its new iPhones delayed in China because the Chinese government feared that the devices might be used to spy on its citizens. (You know something’s wrong when China, of all countries, is worried about protecting its citizens from any kind of government surveillance.)

Twitter’s lawsuit is a more direct way of handling the problem of governmental limitations on data request disclosures. The company says in a blog post that it has attempted to avoid filing a lawsuit in its efforts to convince the government that increased transparency would be good for both Twitter and its users, but its other efforts have failed to lead to any meaningful changes:

We’ve tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail. In April, we provided a draft Transparency Report addendum to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a report which we hoped would provide meaningful transparency for our users. After many months of discussions, we were unable to convince them to allow us to publish even a redacted version of the report.

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