Today, we’re able to speak openly about two national security requests for the first time, specifically two national security letters (NSLs). These NSLs were accompanied by gag orders when they were served (one in 2015, one in 2016), preventing us from notifying the impacted account holders or publicly disclosing their existence. The FBI recently informed us that the gag orders have been lifted and that we may notify the account holders.

We have provided each of the account holders with copies of the relevant NSLs (certain information redacted to protect privacy) as well as the account data we were compelled to produce. 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 U.S. Department of Justice.

We’re encouraged by the lifting of these two gag orders and those recently disclosed by Cloudflare, Google, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!. However, Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive. We continue to push for the legal ability to speak more openly on this topic in our lawsuit against the U.S. government, Twitter v. Lynch.