Twitter publishes FBI letters demanding access to accounts

The FBI seems to have exceeded the scope of existing legal guidance while seeking certain kinds of internet records from Twitter as recently as last year, legal experts said, citing two warrantless surveillance orders the micro-blogging network published yesterday.

Twitter said, its disclosures were the first time it had had been allowed to publicly reveal the secretive orders, which were delivered in 2015 and 2016 and were not to be revealed. Their publication comes after similar disclosures in recent months by other major internet companies, including Alphabet's Google and Yahoo.

Each of the two new orders, known as national security letters (NSLs), called for a type of data known as electronic communication transaction records, which could include some email header data and browsing history, among other information.

In doing so, it strengthened the belief among privacy advocates that the FBI had routinely used NSLs to seek internet records beyond the limitations set down in a 2008 justice department legal memo, which concluded such orders needed to be constrained to phone billing records.

In a blog post announcing the two NSL disclosures, Twitter said it did not hand over all the information the FBI requested.

"While the actual NSLs request a large amount of data, 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," Elizabeth Banker, associate general counsel at Twitter, wrote.

According to the social network, it had been ordered by the feds to provide the name, address and other pertinent information of a user account in 2015, and another in 2016, and to not notify the users.

In the released letters, the account names and the names of the specific investigating agencies were obscured.

The actions from Twitter comes several weeks after tech companies including Google, Yahoo and Cloudflare published national security letters received from the FBI, some dating back to 2013.

"Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive," wrote Banker. "We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when 'classification' prevents speech on issues of public importance."