William Barr Is Blocking The Release Of Another Report, This One Involving Twitter
https://www.inquisitr.com/5433949/william-barr-is-blocking-the-release-of-another-report-this-one-involving-twitter/
While the nation remains transfixed on the ongoing legal showdown between Congress and Attorney General William Barr over the Mueller Report, a much less known controversy regarding the attorney general has continued to unfold, as the ACLU detailed in a blog post published on Friday. This one has less to do with Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and more to do with the social media platform Twitter, not to mention American privacy in general.
For five years, Twitter has attempted to publicize a transparency report which would include statistics detailing the frequency with which the U.S. government requests user data from Twitter. The government continues to push back against that report being made public.
As far back as 2014, Twitter sent its initial report in for review, with the government telling the company that they could not publicize it. The reasoning, they said, was that the report contained classified information. Twitter responded with a lawsuit claiming that blocking the release of the report constituted a violation of the companyโs First Amendment rights.
The government then claimed in a secret and sealed brief presented to the judge alone (not Twitterโs lawyers), that substantial harm could come as a result of Twitter publishing its transparency report, the ACLU explained.
The judge, however, was not persuaded. The case, Twitter, Inc. v. Barr, was dismissed.