Both the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Department of Justice are being sued by Twitter in order to be able to release more information about government surveillance of its users, according to Reuters.
The social media company filed a lawsuit Tuesday in a California federal court to publish its full "transparency report," which documents government requests for user information, Reuters reported.
Twitter published a surveillance report in July but couldn't include the exact number of national security requests it received because Internet companies are prohibited from disclosing that information, even if they didn't get any requests, according to Reuters.
Twitter said in a blog post that it believes it's entitled under the First Amendment to "respond to our users' concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance," Reuters reported.
The FBI also started pushing technology companies like Google, Skype and others to guarantee access to their data streams and grab emails, video chats, pictures and more, according to Reuters.
Yahoo was recently threatened with a daily fine of $250,000 by the United States government if it didn't comply with demands to give up information on its users, Reuters reported. The company reported last month that a secret 2007 lawsuit and subsequent appeal was ultimately unsuccessful, after a federal judge ordered some material about the court challenge to be unsealed.
The Justice Department, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn all agreed to allow the firms to reveal how often they are ordered to turn over information about their customers in national security investigations, but Twitter's lawsuit pushes further and states they should be able to disclose what types of information the government did or didn't ask for, according to Reuters.
