Twitter Publishes Declassifed National Security Letters

January 27, 2017

Lumen Team on

Following close on the heels of a small wave of recently declassified National Security Letters ("NSL"s), including Google's disclosure in December, 2016 of eight such letters, the Internet Archive's disclosure in the same month, along with more from the Internet Archive, and a January 2017 revelation in Cloudflare's transparency report that they had received an NSL in 2013, Twitter has today disclosed two NSLs it received in September of 2015, and June of 2016. These can be found at the following links. https://lumendatabase.org/notices/13782037 and https://lumendatabase.org/notices/13782098

Twitter was under a gag order from the FBI regarding these letters until quite recently. According to the information accompanying copies of the notices on Lumen, the FBI notified Twitter in late 2016 that the gag order was lifted. Twitter then notified the affected account holders and has provided Lumen with copies of the letters themselves, but describes itself as "unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive."

For more information and discussion of all of these disclosures, as well as National Security Letters in general, see:

Google's disclosed NSLs

Some discussion of the Internet Archive's disclosed NSL(via The Intercept)

Discussion of Cloudflare's publication of an NSL

The EFF on the topic of NSLs

A "Statistical Transparency Report Regarding use of National Security Authorities"

^ed