Google challenges U.S. gag order, citing First Amendment
By Craig Timberg, Tuesday, June 18, 12:39 PM E-mail the
writer
Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data
requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak
about information it’s forced to give the government.
The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment’s
guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant
to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping
National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.
Google, one of nine companies named in NSA documents as
providing information to the top-secret PRISM program, has demanded that U.S.
officials give it more leeway to describe the company’s relationship with the
government. Google and the other companies involved have sought to reassure
users that their privacy is being protected from unwarranted intrusions.
In the petition, Google is seeking permission to publish
the total numbers of requests the court makes of the company and the numbers of
user accounts they affect. The company long has made regular reports with
regard to other data demands from the U.S. government and from other
governments worldwide.
“Greater transparency is needed, so today we have
petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish
aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures,
separately,” the company said in a statement.
That information would not necessarily shed much light on
PRISM, whose existence was first reported by The Washington Post and Britain’s
Guardian newspaper. But initiating a high-profile legal showdown may help
Google’s efforts to portray itself as aggressively resisting government
surveillance.
All of the technology companies involved in PRISM,
including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, have struggled to
respond to the revelations about NSA surveillance. Most have issued carefully
word denials, saying that they do not permit wholesale data collection while
acknowledging that they comply with legal government information requests.
(Washington Post Co. chief executive Donald E. Graham is on Facebook’s board.)
FISA court data requests typically are known only to
small numbers of a company’s employees. Discussing the requests openly, either
within or beyond the walls of an involved company, can violate federal law.
The technology companies linked to PRISM publicly urged
U.S. officials last week to ease official secrecy about information requests.
Facebook on Friday night issued its first-ever account of how many data
requests the company gets from government entities – state, local and federal –
in the United States. That number included FISA requests but the information
was categorized too broadly to offer a precise view of these especially
secretive data transfers.
The FISA court, composed of 11 federal judges appointed
by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., rarely rejects government requests for
information and rarely make its opinions public. The court approved each of the
1,789 government requests it received in 2012, except for one that was withdrawn.
In 2008, the court rejected a challenge from a technology
company that argued that a government request for information on foreign users
was too broad to be constitutional. The court redacted the name of the company
and other details when it published the ruling.
Revelations this month about PRISM have sparked fierce
debate about the appropriate balance between national security with privacy
rights, with U.S. officials in recent days mounting vigorous defense of data
collection efforts.
NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander told the House
Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that more than 50 attacks – including one
potentially targeting the New York Stock Exchange -- had been thwarted with the
help of the agency’s surveillance programs. President Obama said on a PBS
interview aired Monday night that the government was “making the right
trade-offs” in allowing the programs.
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