The U.S. can stop Twitter Inc. from releasing details about the government’s demands for user information in national security investigations, a court ruled, in the same week House Republicans are to grill national security officials over surveillance.
Twitter had protested the government’s redactions to a 2014 “transparency report” that featured a numerical breakdown of national security-related data requests from the previous year. The U.S. appeals court in San Francisco on Monday agreed with a lower-court judge that the Justice Department had shown a “compelling” interest in keeping that information secret.
Based on classified and unclassified declarations provided by government officials, the court was “able to appreciate why Twitter’s proposed disclosure would risk making our foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled — if anything at all,” U.S. Circuit Judge Daniel Bress wrote for the three-judge panel.
