US court upholds ‘gag’ rules on surveillance of social media users

‘Privacy advocates suffered a stinging defeat by a federal appeals court which ruled in favor of the FBI’s nondisclosure surveillance requests enforced on social media and tech companies.
A three-judge panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reached a unanimous decision and ruled against privacy advocates while agreeing with a lower court ruling that the FBI, using gag orders, may issue secret national security letters requesting customer data.
Credo Mobile, a phone network operator, and CloudFare, a content distributor, had sued for the right to notify their customers of five national security letters (NSL’s) sent between 2011 and 2013.
The ruling stated that this does not violate free speech protections in the First Amendment of the Constitution.’
Read more: US court upholds ‘gag’ rules on surveillance of social media users