Twitter sues U.S. government over ability to disclose surveillance orders

They weren't trying to constitutionally base it. Does that help?

Twitter's best line of argument is to go directly to violation of their First Amendment rights, and avoid getting side-tracked on questions of "is this censorship" and "is censorship constitutional in the general case".

What is "the freedom of speech?"

You can take it literally: the freedom to say anything you can speak. You probably don't want to go down that route, because the obvious corollary is: "fine, then the First Amendment doesn't cover publication, electronic communications, or expression" because those things are outside the dictionary definition of "speech."

You can also treat it as a phrase that has meaning in context, like "object" does in computer science. But you can't have your cake and eat it too: the same interpretive process the Supreme Court has used to create exceptions to the freedom of speech has also been used to take the freedom far beyond what literally qualifies as "speech." This is particularly true if you're talking about obscenities laws, which mostly deal with things like images and performances which aren't literally speech.

Would you say I am wrong tho?

Voters will only be informed if both social and traditional media are able to provide actionable, verifiable and non-biased reports.

Media will only be able to provide quality information when political, intelligence and profit interests have less leverage than an educated purchasing public majority.

Political/intelligence interests will only have have less leverage if we pass meaningful enforceable legislation to curtail the use of selective privilege, story seeding and psychological operations to achieve policy goals.

Congress will only pass meaningful enforceable legislation if the voters demand it.

...

But hey, governments are "by the people" and "for the people" of course, and to think otherwise would be tantamount to.. actually seeing what's happening!

Fundamentally, the courts are there to uphold the rule of law. If the law's an ass then that's a job for the legislature.

I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes, but it's just not the same thing to a judge. Regardless of whether it is to you and I.

I often wish law was written more like a computer program, with lots of unit tests up front. But I have no idea how to actually achieve that. Real life is so much more complex than input to any computer program that an attempt to formalise law even more than it already is formalised would just result in it being totally incomprehensible to the people who have to follow it (as opposed to mostly). Plus the man on the street tends to get very angry when people who are "obviously" guilty get off on a technicality.

Twitter is a business. Whatever they do is preceded by the expenses vs benefits analysis. In this case the only benefit is an improvement of their public reputation. They want to disassociate themselves with the state surveillance machine.

However this lawsuit means an absolute zilch in terms of an actual surveillance issue. Nor does it move a needle on the very fact that there NSLs exist to begin with. It serves no public interest, it doesn't change things and it's asking not just for peanuts, it's asking for the dust off the peanuts shells. It's a farce. Just as you said - releasing these numbers is a non-issue, so the government will resist for a while and then it will yield. Everyone will cheer for Twitter and the victory, but things will remain exactly where they are now.

The only reason why this lawsuit exists is to improve public's perception of Twitter. It's a PR stunt. I don't see what they should be commended for.