What we’re being asked to believe is that the government doesn’t want you to see their backdoor search queries on Twitter’s database. That I do believe, regardl

What we’re being asked to believe is that the government doesn’t want you to see their backdoor search queries on Twitter’s database. That I do believe, regardless of whether there’s probable cause to think national threats among Twitter users exist. And hey, maybe it’s true... exposing government surveillance overreach probably is considered a threat by the people doing the surveillance, right? OTOH, there probably are at least a few investigations into real cases of abusive or criminal activity. This may be getting used to watch what’s happening in other countries. There are a lot of possibilities for gray area questions that are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal, and Uncle Sam knows that exposure could cause things to lean toward clearly illegal. Let’s not pretend that privacy of Twitter messages is a human right, though. It’s a for-profit business that was already monitoring your traffic, and the government is asking for what Twitter already has access to. While the government may have a very different agenda, using Twitter doesn’t come with any privacy guarantees in the first place. Twitter’s not going to come arrest you, but they were never under a legal obligation to help protect you from the government or anyone else, and Twitter DMs are not private in a legal sense.