Facebook is not alone in challenging gag orders: Microsoft has challenged the constitutionality of the government's practice of seeking gag orders, saying it receives thousands annually.
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The majority of those gag orders contained no time limit.
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In North Dakota, a new law explicitly bans gag orders.
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Half of the demands Facebook received were accompanied by gag orders.
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He also gave similar gag orders to the USDA and HHS.
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"Nondisclosure agreements are essentially gag orders -- plain and simple," Grassley said.
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I've seen a lot of courts questioning these blanket indefinite gag orders.
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The situation revealed the potential imbalance of gag orders, several lawyers argued.
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Gag orders Speaking of which, one could hardly discuss the PBMs without mentioning the ugly practice of using gag orders on pharmacies and other potential whistle-blowers to keep their unwitting customers in the dark about ripoff copays.
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Microsoft has sued the Justice Department over gag orders attached to search warrants.
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"I support banning pharmacy gag orders," Bishop told the newspaper in an email.
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Gag orders, also known as suppression orders, are supposed to work that way.
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Because of gag orders, Apple has not given any such data for 2019.
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Susan Collins, addresses banning the practice of gag orders on a federal level.
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There is a very specific pattern to the shut downs and the gag orders.
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Tens of thousands of NSLs are issued annually, and some gag orders last indefinitely.
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The announcement came after Microsoft sued the DOJ over the gag orders in 2016.
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In a somewhat similar case, Microsoft is challenging the constitutionality of gag orders accompanying warrants.
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Two House Democrats say President Trump's "gag orders" on federal employees appear to violate federal laws.
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But under recently introduced laws, the FBI regularly reviews such gag orders and declassifies some letters.
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These gag orders triggered America's first law protecting federal employee whistleblowers, the Lloyd-La Follette Act.
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The cost of drugs, the proposed merger and the gag orders translate to staggering human suffering.
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The letters do not require judicial approval and are often accompanied by gag orders that prevent companies from ever speaking about the legal process, but with the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 22015, the FBI is now required to periodically review the gag orders.
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The Sunlight Foundation is compiling a list of federal agencies currently under gag orders from the administration.
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Little is known about the details of those requests, which are often subject to strict gag orders.
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Twitter has published a pair of FBI National Security Letters that had been served with gag orders.
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The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time.
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Court documents supporting Microsoft describe thousands more gag orders issued against Google, Yahoo, Twitter and other companies.
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"Officials were not reporting claims from students but instead, imposing gag orders on those victims," MacLeish explains.
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While both address non-disclosure, the difference between search warrants with gag orders and NSLs is imperative.
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The Trump administration's gag orders on federal employees at some government agencies appear to violate federal law. Reps.
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Apple did not reveal in this latest report any national security letters where the gag orders were lifted.
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Previously, gag orders could last indefinitely, preventing companies from ever warning their users about collection of their data.
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Both gag orders issued prohibit publication of certain details of both the investigation and the deal with Harow.
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Twitter also criticized the government restricting its ability to publicly reveal some requests, because of federal gag orders.
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And the reason we don't know is because Fox News settled the cases quietly and imposed those gag orders.
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NSLs used to be issued in secret, with indefinite gag orders that prevented companies from ever acknowledging their existence.
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"Setting time limits on gag orders — that's the single most important thing I would ask of government," Grosse said.
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NSLs are controversial demands for information that are accompanied by gag orders preventing the recipient from revealing the request.
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This is the problem: Gag orders and nondisclosure agreements are wholly designed to protect the perpetrator and the company.
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On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the administration was "looking into" the reports of gag orders.
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They can also ask a judge to issue indefinite gag orders to prevent third parties from discussing the search.
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Twitter users were also primed for this kind of reaction thanks to the reported gag orders at other government agencies.
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EFF was one of several advocacy groups that filed briefs in the case arguing that the gag orders were unlawful.
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But since the Freedom Act passed in 2015, companies have been allowed to request the lifting of those gag orders.
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In many cases, these government gag orders are open-ended, meaning the companies are never allowed to talk about them.
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The overwhelming majority of employees will not challenge restrictive gag orders for fear of being sued or losing their job.
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Because of the way technology has shifted the media landscape, gag orders now raise additional questions of scale and geography.
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"Gag orders without this required language could chill employees from reporting violations of law, waste, fraud, and abuse," Cummings wrote.
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After a series of court rulings found that the gag orders violated First Amendment protections, Congress enacted the review requirements.
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But a federal judge noted "several large loopholes," suggesting that "a large swath" of gag orders might never be reviewed.
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But since the Freedom Act passed in 2015, companies have been allowed to request the lifting of those gag orders.
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The FBI uses NSLs, often accompanied by temporary gag orders on revealing them, to acquire information on technology companies' users.
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Settlement details are often kept confidential by gag orders, but some women have spoken out about the offers they received.
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And customers may be left in the dark when their information is obtained by law enforcement, when gag orders are used.
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It now was able to explain, as previous gag orders were recently lifted by the FBI, that the situation happened twice.
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The NSLs came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government's demands.
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The EFF reports over 500,000 have been issued since 2001, but few have been made public due to the gag orders.
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In addition, prosecutors say they often need the gag orders to prevent their targets from learning that they are under investigation.
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The details of 2,576 of those orders must remain secret, and the gag orders on 1,752 of those cases don't expire.
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In spite of their gag orders, people have come forward to describe to TechCrunch their experiences of sexual harassment at tech companies.
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Although the Park Service apologized for the retweets, calling them "mistaken," the gag orders have spread to other federal agencies as well.
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But since the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 20153, the FBI is required to routinely review the indefinite gag orders.
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Additionally, for tech companies prevented from disclosing search warrants on their users, the gag orders impair transparency and can damage user trust.
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These come with built-in gag orders: it's illegal to even say that you've received one, much less what it was about.
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But, Mr. Smith said, it was the rising portion of gag orders attached to the information warrants that led to the suit.
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Department guidelines say the gag orders must be evaluated three years after an investigation starts and also when an investigation is closed.
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"In this age of gag orders and alternative facts, it's important that we provide federal employees tools to ensure transparency," Beyer added.
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Twitter has fought multiple government requests for information in the past, as well as gag orders preventing it from disclosing the requests themselves.
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The categories for refusing to sell out users and standing up to National Security Letter gag orders are new in this year's report.
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That includes National Security Letters, which are typically classified and subject to complex gag orders preventing companies from describing them in any detail.
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Justice officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets.
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To be sure, there is a very high bar discouraging trial judges from issuing gag orders, particularly against a defendant or his lawyer.
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Unfortunately, credit card companies like American Express have managed to stymie fee competition with those gag orders on merchants who contract with them.
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Scientists at federal agencies have been hit with gag orders preventing them from communicating their findings, or in some cases, attending scientific conferences.
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However, because of the gag orders accompanying the NSLs, neither Cloudflare nor CREDO could include information about the FBI's demands in its transparency report.
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On behalf of Cloudflare and CREDO, the EFF is arguing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that NSLs and gag orders are unconstitutional.
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Nearly half of those demands were accompanied by gag orders preventing Microsoft from notifying the affected customers that the government had requested their information.
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Microsoft is stepping away from the legal fight as the Department of Justice introduces new rules about gag orders that will limit their use.
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Under the changes, the government will end the use of indefinite gag orders and limit its secrecy demands to the most serious of cases.
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The letters are often accompanied by indefinite gag orders that prevent companies from informing users when their data is handed over to law enforcement.
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"We're encouraged by the lifting of these two gag orders and those recently disclosed by Cloudflare, Google, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo," Banker wrote.
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Justice Department officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets.
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In its brief, Apple said it had received about 590 gag orders, of unlimited or indefinite durations, in the first eight months of 2016.
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Jackson's use of gag orders has drawn the attention of legal experts, who see the gag order concept as increasingly on its last legs.
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Tech companies have criticized the process for its lack of judicial oversight and have argued that the gag orders violate their right to free speech.
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Limiting gag orders helps users because it informs them that they're being investigated and gives them a chance to challenge the warrants for their information.
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Twitter disclosed on Friday that the FBI had issued the tech company two national security letters accompanied by gag orders in the past two years.
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Given this administration's apparent penchant for 'alternative facts,' it is not unreasonable to expect that these gag orders will be followed up by 'alternative science.
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It also left open the possibility that he would agree to impose gag orders on Facebook if the prosecutors could convince him with more details.
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The Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that gag orders issued with warrant-like national security letters do not violate the First Amendment.
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President Donald Trump has moved to remove those "gag orders," but many pharmacists can still only talk to patients about their options if they're asked.
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Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which was supposed to limit these kinds of investigations, including the gag orders issued by the FBI.
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"Other women who are under gag orders, who cannot talk, they have been silenced," Ms. Walsh said while seated next to her lawyer, Lisa Bloom.
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Internet companies argue that these open-ended requests, which often come with gag orders prohibiting the companies from informing users about the warrants, are excessive.
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Just days after taking power last month, the Trump administration reportedly issued gag orders on federal scientists, preventing them from discussing their work with the public.
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Tech companies have Microsoft to thank, as the Washington state tech giant led the charge against prosecutor gag orders with a lawsuit filed in April 2016.
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Writing for the panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta said the gag orders meet a compelling U.S. government interest, are sufficiently narrow and allow for appropriate judicial review.
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The lawsuit is targeting the constitutionality of accompanying gag orders that prevent tech companies from notifying their users that the federal government is investigating their data.
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And, after gag orders were imposed in some agencies, dozens of rogue Twitter accounts have popped up to allow federal employees to communicate with the public.
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Microsoft decided to sue the government over the gag orders the Department of Justice puts on companies after they've received user data by obtaining a warrant.
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But since the introduction of the Freedom Act, passed in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations, the FBI has to periodically review the gag orders.
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Just days after taking power last month, the Trump administration reportedly issued gag orders on federal scientists, preventing them from discussing their work with the public.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing web performance company Cloudflare and mobile network Credo, said the gag orders accompanying the NSLs violated the companies' rights to free speech.
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The president has called climate change a "Chinese hoax," silenced government scientists with gag orders, and suggested a budget that would be very bad for scientific research.
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Microsoft claims that these gag orders violate customers' right to know when the government searches their property, and the company's right to communicate freely with its customers.
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But other corrective actions, like limiting NSL gag orders and increasing threat sharing, could go a long way in healing the fraught relationship between tech and government.
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The American Civil Liberties Union wants to help Microsoft challenge government gag orders that prevent it from telling its customers when it receives warrants for their information.
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Tech companies complain that such gag orders make it impossible for them to explain to customers what sort of data they do and do not turn over.
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Worst of all, many companies—Uber included—require employees to sign non-disclosure agreements that serve as gag orders, silencing survivors with the threat of a lawsuit.
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The trial court in this case, after a full trial, found direct evidence that American Express's gag orders were anticompetitive and thus an illegal restraint on trade.
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"Gag orders are futile in a case of global interest in the digital age," said Steven Butler, an official of the Washington-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
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Microsoft argues, however, that law enforcement is overdoing it with its gag orders and unfairly depriving the company of its right to be transparent with its customers.
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The company has challenged gag orders in previous cases in which it was prevented from telling users that a government was seeking access to their personal information.
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Gag orders have typically been used to keep data providers like Microsoft silent, and not inform customers when their cloud data has been searched or inspected by authorities.
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The digital giant is suing on behalf of its customers, arguing that such gag orders are only appropriate when alerting customers would cause a security or safety risk.
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Rather, Google hopes that the commission will recommend a time limit for gag orders, so that they will eventually expire and companies will be allowed to disclose them.
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Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said that after meeting recently with a group of pharmacists in her state, she was "outraged" to learn about the gag orders.
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With reports proliferating about executive branch agencies under gag orders, Mr. Spicer told reporters that the White House is "looking into it," though he didn't exactly deny it.
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Since 2015, the SEC has brought four cases targeting specific types of so-called whistleblower gag orders, such as confidentiality agreements that bar employees from discussing internal wrongdoing.
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Donald Trump's reported gag orders on federal science agencies are continuing to spawn a wave of anonymous Twitter accounts, each claiming to speak for a branch of the government.
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Since the introduction of the Freedom Act in 216, the FBI was required to periodically review the gag orders and lift them when they were no longer deemed necessary.
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They're also often accompanied by indefinite gag orders that prevent companies from ever disclosing that they received the letters, or notifying their users that they were targeted for surveillance.
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Last week, Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued guidance declaring that prosecutors should no longer use such "gag orders," except in extreme cases, the Washington Post reported.
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Microsoft's lawyers also argued their own First Amendment rights were violated by the gag orders that prevented them from notifying customers that government officials were looking through their data.
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It's unclear whether this was done directly at the White House's behest, but restrictive gag orders by the Trump administration have already leaked from several federal agencies, muzzling them online.
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And because of gag orders from employers that prevent people from saying anything that could be disparaging to them, we don't often get to hear the stories about sexual harassment.
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Even though some federal agencies haven't been ordered to stop tweeting and publishing data, it's possible that the reports of gag orders are having a chilling effect among federal employees.
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It would also raise the requirements for the use of gag orders, and require reports from the FCC and Government Accountability Office on the use of phone-tracking Stingray devices.
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But, thanks to legislation passed last year, the gag orders that accompany NSLs are periodically reviewed and sometimes lifted — which means companies like Cloudflare eventually get to talk about them.
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Under these new guidelines, the companies say they will "attempt to notify" individuals when their data is requested, although they may be blocked from doing so by court gag orders.
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What's next: Both Microsoft and outside groups called on the Senate to pass a bill, which has already unanimously passed the House, that would limit gag orders to 180 days.
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Many of the gag orders come without an expiration date, so Microsoft and other cloud storage companies are never allowed to tell customers that their data has been turned over.
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Microsoft said it will drop its lawsuit against the Department of Justice over gag orders that prevent companies from telling customers when their personal data has been accessed by investigators.
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Restrictions relating to NSL orders were relaxed by Congress' passage of the USA Freedom Act in June, 2015, which requires the FBI to review the necessity of individual NSL gag orders.
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Effectively, Adobe successfully argued that these gag orders should come with an expiration date, after which the company can disclose federal investigations into its users as part of routine transparency reporting.
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The gag orders have largely silenced the laid-off employees, while allowing the employers to publicly defend their actions as legal, which is technically accurate, given the loopholes in the law.
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Former employees of Eversource Energy have also begun to challenge their severance-related gag orders by publicly discussing their dismissals and replacement by foreign workers on H-1B and other visas.
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The gag orders on tech companies that receive government demands for user information — created by the "secrecy order" provision of the Stored Communications Act, enacted in 1986 — only aggravate the situation.
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Because so few gag orders have been reviewed and rescinded, it isn't possible to say whether the companies that received the most termination letters also received the most national security letters.
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Currently, when government agencies obtain search warrants forcing communications service providers to turn over your personal records, the government can issue gag orders preventing these service providers from ever telling you.
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Some First Amendment experts say gag orders are becoming outmoded because it's no longer clear what it means to ban someone from talking to the media or even from speaking publicly.
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And Fox has managed to minimize exposure by requiring, as a condition of her employment, arbitration (rather than lawsuits) and by imposing gag orders on the women as part of the settlement.
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Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that because they are issued without judicial review and in total secrecy, indefinite gag orders imposed along with national security letters violate the First Amendment.
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The gag orders prevent Microsoft and other companies from alerting users when the companies receive government requests for their data, which Microsoft argued was a violation of its rights to free speech.
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At the turn of the century, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft were so upset with federal employees leaking information to Congress that they tried to implement gag orders restricting such disclosures.
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Critics have argued that innocent people's data is caught up in this dragnet, but law enforcement has been less than forthcoming owing to gag orders from the companies that provide the devices.
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In 2015 and 2016, Twitter was twice compelled by the FBI to disclose information about two users — and the gag orders on these requests have been lifted, the company said on Friday.
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Microsoft has dropped a lawsuit against the U.S. government after the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved to limit the routine use of gag orders on technology companies in connection with ongoing investigations.
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Much of the concern about the letters has focused on the gag orders, which accompany nearly every request and prevent the recipient — typically indefinitely — from disclosing even the existence of the letter.
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After passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015, the FBI adopted guidelines that require gag orders to be reviewed for necessity three years after issuance or after an investigation is closed.
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Defendants often don't seem to respect gag orders, social media makes them almost impossible to enforce, and, in prominent cases, the president has displayed an unrivaled penchant for offering pointed public commentary.
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They also requested that news outlets stop publishing Ghaffar's name and use negative photographs of him, as well as put a "no to media gag orders" banner on websites and paper editions.
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Twitter said its disclosures were the first time the company had been allowed to publicly reveal the secretive orders, which were delivered with gag orders when they were issued in 2015 and 2016.
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Last month, Andrew Crocker of the Electronic Frontier Foundation referred to these government demands as "secret gag orders," and Microsoft drew the support of other major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
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The company is pushing Congress to impose further limits on gag orders—and its other high profile lawsuit over government access to user data is set to be argued before the Supreme Court.
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Companies and privacy advocates argue that gag orders rely on outdated laws and are applied too often, sometimes indefinitely, to bar them from notifying customers about government requests for their private online data.
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Conservatives targeted in the probe were slapped with gag orders — legally barring them from speaking out about what was happening — and subjected to unconstitutional surveillance and paramilitary-style police raids into their homes.
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The documents obtained through the lawsuit include the number of orders reviewed, as well as redacted copies of 751 letters from the F.B.I. informing companies and organizations their gag orders had been lifted.
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The Senate's version would also eliminate government gag orders for U.S. companies complying with search warrants – an issue that significantly impacts the rights of privacy and free speech for both businesses and customers.
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Olson and other attorneys filed the notice after news reports regarding impending changes to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) climate change website as well as gag orders placed on the agency and Agriculture Department.
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Image: APYou might never know if police or FBI agents are reading your emails or files stored in the cloud, because the DOJ frequently issues indefinite gag orders that block companies from telling you.
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On Thursday, however, Microsoft cited the Hotmail ruling as a key precedent in a lawsuit the company filed against the government challenging indefinite gag orders when the government subpoenas information from a customer account.
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Microsoft sued the Justice Department today, challenging the constitutionality of the gag orders issued by the government that prevent tech companies from informing their customers when their data is accessed as part of an investigation.
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Specifically, the Justice Department's new binding guidelines halt courts from routinely imposing gag orders that prevent technology companies from informing customers when their electronic records have been turned over to investigators, The Washington Post reported.
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Its decision came after the DOJ issued a new binding policy that requires prosecutors to give more detailed reasons when applying for gag orders and makes it much harder to seek one that lasts indefinitely.
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Other than outlawing anti-consumer gag orders, legislation may not be necessary — as in every other market, sellers would post prices and qualifications once they are competing for price-conscious patients who control the money.
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Gretchen Goldman, Research Director at Union of Concerned Scientists, told a packed room that the Trump administration has already placed gag orders on government departments involved in scientific research, frozen hiring and removed information from websites.
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Photo: GettyAfter filing a lawsuit against the US government last year, Microsoft announced yesterday that it is dropping the suit challenging the gag orders which frequently accompany warrants used to pry user data from tech companies.
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In 2580, the company successfully pressured the FBI into withdrawing an NSL targeting an enterprise customer, and last year it sued the Justice Department over gag orders pertaining to other types of requests for user data.
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NSLs have historically been issued with interminable gag orders preventing tech companies from discussing the letters or their contents, but the passage of the USA Freedom Act last year allowed companies to begin disclosing the letters.
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How much profit it has made or how much it is worth is unknown, largely because it is protected in a similar way to Israel's intelligence agencies, including by gag orders restricting coverage of its activities.
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Judges in Australia and some other countries, including Britain, often issue gag orders that temporarily restrict the publication of information related to a criminal proceeding on the grounds that it might sway jurors or potential jurors.
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Companies such as Twitter and CloudFlare have recently challenged these gag orders, however the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July that they don't have a First Amendment right to talk about the NSLs they receive.
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A judge initially blocked Facebook from telling users about the warrants at the government's request, but federal prosecutors this month dropped the secrecy demand after Facebook and civil liberties and electronic privacy groups challenged the gag orders.
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One of the EFF's major arguments is that the companies have a First Amendment right to discuss the orders they receive from the government and that the gag orders represent a prior restraint on their free speech.
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So Mr Trump seems to have imported a device often used in the private sector, but never before employed in the executive branch: sweeping gag orders covering everything—from secrets to mere gossip—picked up at work.
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There's been a lot of coverage of alleged "gag orders" that the Trump administration has issued to employees at various federal agencies, and now the one to Department of Health and Human Services employees has been released.
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Jackson has previously hit other Mueller targets with gag orders, imposing one in November 2017 on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates and their lawyers just days after Manafort and Gates' initial indictments.
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Even after he was charged in a felony indictment, the prosecutors said, Mr. Stone continued to try to manipulate the administration of justice by threatening Judge Jackson in a social media post and violating her gag orders.
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Prosecutors characterized Mr. Stone's apparent appeal for a pardon as part of a pattern of violations of gag orders imposed by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington, who oversaw his case.
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EFF gave Amazon credit for doing some work to protect users but said the company could improve by notifying its users when the government requests their data and by fighting gag orders that sometimes accompany data requests.[ZDNet]
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"Gag orders that freeze communications with the public and government officials go against basic notions of government transparency and accountability," Michael Macleod-Ball, chief of staff of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement to TechCrunch.
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This week, the Trump administration issued gag orders affecting several government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service.
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The company said in its U.S.-specific report that it had notified users affected by five additional national security letters (NSLs) — issued by the FBI without any judicial oversight — after a court released Twitter from their gag orders.
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Cloudflare's counsel, Kenneth Carter, revealed in a blog post this week that the company was one of the two previously unnamed clients in an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of NSLs and their accompanying gag orders.
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Ending the pharmacy gag orders was included the plan, as well as speeding up the approval of over-the-counter medications and asking the Food and Drug Administration to require manufacturers to include prices in their TV ads.
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Microsoft's chief complaint was that the government was using the gag orders on a routine basis and in some cases making them indefinite, in essence preventing Microsoft from ever telling its customers that their data had been retrieved.
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And it seeks to stop law enforcement from slapping the likes of Google or Microsoft with gag orders that are indefinite in length — preventing those companies from informing their customers whenever their data is the subject of scrutiny.
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In my interactions with Nu over the years, I could tell that he was genuinely interested in (and knowledgeable about) a lot of the issues affecting Twitter, from National Security Letter gag orders to Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices.
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Microsoft said Monday it will drop a lawsuit against the federal government after the Justice Department agreed to limit its use of "gag orders" to prevent Internet service providers from notifying customers that the government has accessed their information.
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The lawsuit and legislation partially overlap, but many of the changes to gag orders that Microsoft is looking for with its lawsuit are not included in the House bill slated for floor action at the end of the month.
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They made the pledge in 2018 after a public DNA database was used to identify the Golden State Killer, further promising to try to notify users if law enforcement demanded their information (though gag orders could theoretically prevent that).
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Both measures, the Know the Lowest Price Act and the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act, aim to end the drug industry's so-called gag orders of pharmacists, which prevent them from discussing cheaper price options with consumers.
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In a blog post released with the report, Microsoft criticized excessive security and surveillance orders and praised the USA Freedom Act that passed in 2015, which allows tech companies to disclose NSLs to the public after temporary gag orders.
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In a world of "alternative facts," gag orders on scientists, and toxic rhetoric that would've drowned Sonic the Hedgehog in a hot minute, it's worth remembering that a lot of Sega games in the 1990s were really psyched about environmentalism.
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But Trump doubled down on his alarming efforts to silence America's scientists on Tuesday, announcing gag orders on the EPA and the Department of Agriculture that forbid federal employees from communicating with the public or releasing information of any kind.
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National security letters are used by the FBI to extract information from companies about their users and are often accompanied by interminable gag orders that prevent companies from informing their users or the public about the government's access to their information.
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But even though the companies can now admit they received these secret requests, Cloudflare and CREDO are still arguing in the 9th Circuit that the years-long gag orders preventing them from discussing the NSLs violate their right to free speech.
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The debate: The U.S. government argued gag orders on these requests were necessary because providing more detailed reporting than what Twitter is authorized to release would make the information classified, and therefore it would not be protected under the First Amendment.
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Australia's approach to law and order — with sweeping gag orders that prevent reporting on trials, a confounding web of privacy regulations and defamation laws that favor plaintiffs — are intended to protect both victims and defendants, and to ensure fairness in court.
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The latest move by the Trump administration is part of a sweeping round of gag orders placed on multiple agencies related to science and the environment, with the apparent intention of quieting voices opposed to Trump's own opinions on climate change.
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Reddit and Twitter, for example, have each come under fire for their overly tolerant stance on free (read: hate) speech; on the flipside, Facebook and Instagram have been called out for issuing gag orders on what many users feel is legitimate content.
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Although companies like Facebook and Google are known to have fought for transparency around National Security Letters, they didn't earn stars in that category because they haven't yet made public commitments to requesting judicial review of the gag orders that often accompany NSLs.
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Of course, Yahoo can't fess up to the email scanning or describe the order that led to it — National Security Letters and FISA court orders are typically accompanied by gag orders that prevent companies from talking about the requests they receive from government.
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After a Tuesday filled with news of gag orders on government scientists at several federal agencies, others in the science community are rapidly coming up with ways of pushing back against the new administration's attempts to keep tax-funded research from the public.
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Cloudflare's latest transparency report reveals that the company received a national security letter back in 2013 — and includes a chilling story about how NSL gag orders have kept the public and politicians in the dark about the FBI's use of secret subpoenas.
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From the New York Times: That stuff seems like common sense, as does Trump's promise to get rid of the "gag orders" that, fucking unbelievably, prohibit pharmacists from telling people that they could save money by paying cash for some prescription medications.
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As the charges racked up, several of DxE's activists took plea deals, agreeing to pay hundreds of dollars in restitution and accepting gag orders that prevent them from criticizing the particular company they had sought to expose, in exchange for escaping jail time.
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Google wasn't allowed to share, or even mention, that it receives such letters until earlier this year, when the company announced that a gag order on a letter it previously received had been lifted — gag orders otherwise keep National Security Letters classified interminably.
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Under the new rules, the CFTC said that companies cannot take steps to impede a would-be whistleblower from speaking with the CFTC about possible violations of the federal derivatives laws, such as by forcing them to sign confidentiality agreements or other gag orders.
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As pressure mounts on Congress to overhaul its secretive system for dealing with sexual harassment and workplace complaints, members are starting to rally around legislation that would do away with mandatory gag orders and provide victims with their own representation for the first time.
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Prosecutors on Monday recommended that Stone face seven to nine years in prison, a reflection, they said, of the fact that the investigation he impeded struck at the core of democracy and that he repeatedly violated gag orders imposed by the judge in the case.
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Microsoft has made a habit of challenging the U.S. government on data collection and surveillance — its lawsuit over gag orders issued by law enforcement to prevent companies from telling their customers when their data has been requested is being heard in court this week.
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The first March for Science, which happened last April, was organized as the scientific community grew increasingly concerned over the White House's anti-science stances — like imposing gag orders on government scientists, meeting with anti-vaxxers, and proposing deep budget cuts for scientific research.
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Yahoo and Microsoft have sued the Justice Department over its use of NSLs and gag orders, and Yahoo recently won a major victory in its case — the company was allowed to make public three of the NSLs it received, with the targeted users' information redacted.
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Modern law on gag orders is almost all derived from what is now a half-century-old Supreme Court precedent stemming from the sensational and chaotic murder trial of an Ohio physician, Sam Sheppard, who was accused and convicted of killing his pregnant wife.
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Scientists are well aware of this, and — while these gag orders may yet prove to be temporary — some fear that this is an opening shot in a Trump administration war on how science is conducted and communicated through the course of at least the next four years.
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Apple's use of "declassified" in its reporting language, along with the fact that it usually takes some time for the FBI to review old gag orders, suggests that Apple probably received the NSL some time ago and is only now allowed to make that fact public.
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Yahoo was not able to clarify details of the Reuters article on Tuesday because orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are secret by law, and an increasing number of other government requests come with gag orders that prohibit tech companies from even acknowledging they exist.
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Albert Gidari, a lawyer who long represented tech and telecommunications companies and is now the privacy director at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, said Silicon Valley had been associated with the subpoenas because it was more willing than other industries to fight the gag orders.
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Riseup was unable to inform its users of the warrants because of related gag orders, although it did say in a November 2016 interview with The Intercept that the case did not concern a National Security Letter—controversial legal demands for data that the FBI often uses.
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The EFF rates all of them on a five-star scale, with five different measures: following industry-wide best privacy practices, informing users about requests for your data, selling users out to third parties, standing up to gag orders and supporting the abolishment or reform for Section 702 surveillance.
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That morning, news had broken about gag orders for employees and scientists at the USDA and EPA that prevented members of either agency from discussing their work via documents or social media, despite the obvious violation of ethics policies at those agencies that promote communication with the public.
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The Uber deal has exposed Son at his most fundamental: Privately, he has negotiated the $10 billion deal with Uber's existing investors with trademark hardball — offering low-ball pricing, gag orders and an ever-shifting coalition of alliances in order to better position himself in the deal of the year.
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Canaries act as a workaround for U.S. gag orders which prevent companies publicly disclosing warrants for user requests by publishing an explicit statement that they have not received any warrants for user data to date — allowing for the reverse to be signaled if a canary is removed or not updated.
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With its five more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of American Express and its "gag orders" — which forbid merchants that contract with American Express from encouraging customers to use other credit cards — even though these restrictions are blatantly anticompetitive and raise prices for consumers.
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Alas, we have a president who brags about sexually abusing woman, lots of gold in the parachutes handed to Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly after they were ousted, "gag orders" as standard operating procedure, and countless women in every industry who are experiencing offensive and often criminal sexual misconduct right now.
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At the time, there were reports of gag orders on federal scientists (some of which turned out to be overblown), climate-related tweets from agency accounts getting deleted, references to climate change removed from federal websites, and people nationwide desperately scrambling to preserve scientific data they feared might soon disappear online.
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"The documents released by the FBI show that a wide range of services and providers receive NSLs and that the majority of them never tell their customers or the broader public, even after the government releases them from NSL gag orders," said Aaron Mackey, a staff attorney at the EFF.
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Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley excoriated the FBI for putting in place what he said amounted to "gag orders," demanding the bureau turn over what his committee has asked for regarding Comey, his firing and statements he made publicly during the campaign about the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server.
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Specifically: After the White House placed gag orders on officials in the EPA and the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, Health and Human Services, the National Park Service stepped into the vacuum, tweeting perhaps inconvenient facts about the reality of climate change and drawing similarly inconvenient analogies between Japanese-American internment and the administration's new immigration policy.
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"I can't tell you that Roger is a saint — he pushes everything to the limit even with you," Stone's wife Nydia wrote, alluding to Stone's run-ins with the judge over her gag orders and perhaps to an Instagram post he sent during the trial that included a picture of Jackson next to what appeared to be crosshairs.
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Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, said in an email to BuzzFeed News that although the fight over the gag orders was over, it was still possible that the individuals whose Facebook accounts were at issue could go to court to challenge the government's requests for their information.
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A unanimous three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided with a lower court decision in finding that rules permitting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send national security letters under gag orders are appropriate and do not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution's free speech protections.
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The report has specifically removed a "warrant canary" — a small passage of text that confirmed Reddit had not received a classified request — that was present in the previous year's report, as close as the company can come to admitting it received such a request since January 29th, 2015, without violating the gag orders they come with.
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The claim is a bit threadbare now that the gag orders are mostly lifted — Judge Sandra Ikuta opened yesterday's hearing by asking if the entire case is now moot — but the two firms say the case must continue because they're still gagged from discussing some of the details of the NSLs, like the identity of the subscriber whose data was requested.
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Screenshot: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / The New York TimesWhile it's widely known that tech companies such as Google and Facebook are routinely served NSLs, the documents—751 letters informing companies that their gag orders had been lifted—offer new insight into the scope of the businesses receiving them: not only banks (big and small), but universities, money-transfer services, domain registrars, and voice-over-internet (VoIP) providers.
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I am disappointed that more Democrats in Congress — who would obviously agree that the manner of the arrest and such arbitrary gag orders violate their basic beliefs — don't join Republicans in questioning these actions for fear that anything that undermines Mueller in turn helps President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE.
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