Katelynn Richardson
The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a challenge brought by Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, against the government’s “unconstitutional” censorship of its Transparency Report.
The company filed its lawsuit in 2014 after the FBI said it could not publish a report disclosing how many times the government requested user information for national security investigations. In a brief order Monday, the Supreme Court rejected without explanation the company’s appeal of a decision backing the government’s restriction.
“If this Court does not intervene, different standards will apply in different circuits when entities like Twitter want to disclose how and how often the Government has demanded information from them,” X wrote in its petition to the Supreme Court. “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in March that “the government’s redactions of Twitter’s Transparency Report were narrowly tailored in support of the compelling government interest in national security,” affirming a lower court’s ruling.
“Against the backdrop of explicit illustrations set forth in the classified materials of the threats that exist and the ways in which the government can best protect its intelligence resources, the panel was able to appreciate why Twitter’s proposed disclosure would risk making foreign adversaries aware of what is being surveilled and what is not being surveilled—if anything at all,” the court ruled.
Court documents released in August revealed that special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for former president Donald Trump’s Twitter account in January 2023. The company, which fought a nondisclosure order barring it from notifying anyone about the warrant on First Amendment grounds, was hit with a $350,000 sanction for delaying compliance and not producing the required information until three days after the court’s deadline.
The warrant granted Smith access to Trump’s direct messages, draft tweets, location data and search history, along with other information, according to an unsealed court document.
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