As you and your friends are busy tweeting and reading your feed, it’s easy to forget that somewhere, perhaps in Washington, there’s a government agency hungry for the details about who’s saying what. On Monday, Twitter released its first ever transparency report and revealed that the United States government makes far and away the most user information requests, and Twitter complies with the vast majority of them. In the first six months of 2012, U.S. government made 679 such requests, and Twitter supplied some or all of the information requested 75 percent of the time. These numbers stand out starkly against countries like the United Kingdom and Canada, where Twitter complied with only 18 percent of the 11 requests made. In countries elsewhere in the world, Twitter received less than ten requests and in most cases complied with none of them.So what’s up with Uncle Sam wanting to know so much about what’s happening on Twitter? Well, it’s hard to know specifically why the government requested the data. It could be in connection with a court case or possibly related to a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request, of which Twitter complied with over 5,000. However, based on the cases we do know about, like that of Occupy protester Malcolm Harris, these transactions are not always without conflict. On the same day that Twitter released its transparency report, a New York judge ordered Twitter to surrender Harris’s tweets and user data, after Twitter tried to challenge the subpoena. Harris was one of the hundreds of protesters that stormed the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, and after he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, a judge subpoenaed his Twitter data. Harris challenged the subpoena, and when he came up short, Twitter stepped in to quash the subpoena themselves. They did not succeed.Twitter deserves a pat on the back both for attempting to protect its users like in the case of Malcolm Harris and for being transparent in reporting the government requests. But even still, we’re left with few answers as to why the United States stands out as a particularly probing government. We at least know that this is a trend. Google puts out a similar transparency report, and in the most recent version, the United States is second only to Brazil in the number of requests for user data. Google complied with about 40 percent of the 187 requests from July to December 2011. Unlike Twitter, Google also complied with a number of takedown requests raising the charge from government snooping to government censorship. So Twitter could be doing worse. For now, mysterious details notwithstanding, it appears that they’re fighting on the right side of free speech. If only the government would consistently do the same.
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