Day: April 7, 2017

The U.S. government on Friday dropped its effort to force Twitter to identify users behind an account critical of President Donald Trump, the social media company said.

In response, Twitter said it was dropping a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government that challenged the request to unmask the users.

Twitter had sued just a day earlier, claiming the government overstepped its authority in issuing a summons to reveal the account owners.

The lawsuit said that the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection had sought the identity of the users of Twitter handle @ALT-USCIS.

‘Alternative’ handles

The account describes itself as “immigration resistance.” Its creators told media outlets the account is run by current and former employees of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.

It is one of several “alternative” handles purportedly created by current federal employees unhappy with the Trump administration.

It was not immediately clear why the government withdrew its effort to identify the Twitter users. It was also not immediately known whether the government had closed an investigation it said it was conducting into the Twitter account.

The American Civil Liberties Union praised the government’s decision to withdraw its request, saying in a tweet, “Big victory for free speech and the right to dissent.”
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Twitter on Thursday sued to block an order by the U.S. government demanding that it reveal who is behind an account opposed to President Donald Trump’s tough immigration policies.

Twitter cited freedom of speech as a basis for not turning over records about the account, @ALT_uscis. The account is claimed to be the work of at least one federal immigration employee, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court.

The acronym USCIS refers to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the account describes itself as “immigration resistance.” Trump has vowed to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

Following Trump’s inauguration in January, anonymous Twitter feeds that borrowed the names and logos of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies appeared to challenge the president’s views on climate change and other issues. They called themselves “alt” accounts.

Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio declined to comment on whether the government had demanded information about other accounts critical of Trump.

User privacy advocate

Twitter, which counts Trump among its active users, has a record of litigating in favor of user privacy.

“The rights of free speech afforded Twitter’s users and Twitter itself under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution include a right to disseminate such anonymous or pseudonymous political speech,” Twitter said in the lawsuit.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment on pending litigation. The Justice Department, which typically represents federal agencies in court, and the White House had no immediate comment.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement that it was a waste of resources to try to uncover an anonymous critic, and he called on the Homeland Security inspector general to investigate who directed the “witch hunt.”

Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Twitter user, said the government’s request was highly unusual. Requests for social media account information from the U.S. government typically involve national security or criminal charges, she said.

“We have seen no reason the government has given for seeking to unmask this speaker’s identity,” Bhandari said, adding that the right to anonymous speech against the government is “a bedrock American value” strongly protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Tweeter’s response

Shortly after the lawsuit became public, @ALT_uscis tweeted a copy of the First Amendment and a picture of part of the lawsuit. The account’s followers nearly tripled to 89,000 in the hours after the news broke.

For weeks the account has posted criticism of the administration. It tweeted a parody of the game bingo for “right-wing idiots,” said that some anti-immigration advocates must have been dropped on their heads at birth, and mocked Trump for not giving more of his wealth to charities.

Twitter said it received an administrative summons last month demanding that it provide records related to the account.

A copy of the summons filed with the lawsuit says the records are needed for an investigation to ensure compliance with duties, taxes and fines, and other customs and immigration matters.

It was not immediately clear how the anonymous account fit into those laws and regulations, and Twitter said the summons was an abuse of a law meant to be used to investigate imported merchandise.

Twitter might have a strong case that the summons was improper, said Paul Alan Levy, staff attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, who specializes in online privacy and free speech issues.

“I don’t think there is any way for the government to come out of this looking good,” Levy said.

There is no indication that the White House was aware of the summons, which was signed by a Florida-based supervisor who works in an office that investigates employee corruption, misconduct and mismanagement. The supervisor could not be reached for comment.

The summons requested, but apparently did not order, that Twitter keep the document private.

Past battles

The social media company has a history of challenging government demands for information on its users, including a 2012 demand from New York prosecutors about an Occupy Wall Street protester. In that case, Twitter was forced to hand over tweets from the protester to a judge who threatened the company with sanctions, and the protester pleaded guilty of disorderly conduct.

Twitter sued the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014, seeking permission to publicly disclose more information about requests it gets from U.S. authorities for information about its users.

The lawsuit was partly dismissed last year.

Among the lawyers representing Twitter in the latest case is Seth Waxman, a former high-ranking Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton.
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Pirooz Parvarandeh, a longtime Silicon Valley executive, saw a problem.

Although he has lived in the United States for more than 40 years, he knew little about the contributions and accomplishments of Iranian Americans like himself. That lack of knowledge is widespread, he feared, and in his view makes Iranians in America more subject to stereotypes, discrimination and attacks.

“What image comes up with ‘Iranian’? A terrorist? A hostage-taker? Or a contributing member of society?” he asked at a talk this week at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we don’t know the contributions of Iranian Americans, how can we expect the American public to know? If the public is not with us, why would policymakers want to stick up for us?”

Last year, Parvarandeh met with other Iranian Americans to come up with the Iranian Americans’ Contribution Project, a nonprofit that uses technology to gather and analyze data about Iranian Americans. Their efforts picked up steam after Iran was listed among countries included in the Trump administration’s travel ban.

“We want to build a shield,” Parvarandeh said. “We want to build a protective mechanism to say, ‘Here is what we’ve done.'”

Counting contributions

Parvarandeh’s quest is one that many immigrant groups have considered as they try to both assimilate in the U.S. and stand proud of their cultural identity. For Iranian Americans, the issue has been especially complicated by long-standing tensions between the U.S. and Iran. An estimated one million Iranians live in the U.S., mainly in California.

The project aims to stay out of the political fray and has no religious affiliation. It approaches the question of Iranian Americans’ contributions in a systematic way, something Parvarandeh considers “pioneering” among all of the U.S. diaspora groups. 

Working with software engineers, the project has come up with an algorithm that captures 200,000 unique Iranian last names and 70,000 unique first names. By applying that algorithm to public databases the organization buys or finds of professional organizations, scholarly articles and licensing bodies, the project creates a snapshot of Iranian Americans in a variety of professions.

So far, the project has found 490 Iranian American chiropractors, more than 9,000 physicians, more than 3,000 dentists and about 1,000 pharmacists. Iranians have been awarded at least 40,000 patents and they make up more than 2.5 percent of lawyers admitted to the State Bar of California. On its website, the project shows where Iranians in a variety of professions are on a U.S. map, sometimes county by county. It also offers a breakdown of professions of people found through LinkedIn. 

Since some Iranian names can be found in other countries, the algorithm also calculates the probability that a person is Iranian.

Building a brand

The approach has its limits. The second generation of Iranian Americans and people marrying non-Iranian Americans may begin to take more American-sounding names. But Parvarandeh says he is hoping that Iranian Americans will participate in the project and help make it more accurate. At the moment, the data is anonymized, meaning that it doesn’t list the names of people it captures. But the project combines the data with interviews with Iranian Americans about their life stories and accomplishments.

“There are many arrows being shot in our direction,” he said. “There’s anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and Europe. What we’re trying to do is build a reputation, build a brand.”
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