After being served the warrant, however, the company took several days to respond. Twitter then filed a motion to vacate the nondisclosure order on February 2, arguing the order violated the First Amendment, and refused to comply. The company demanded that U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who was overseeing the case at the time, block enforcement of the search warrant until the matter was resolved.
Instead, Howell found Twitter in contempt and fined the platform $50,000 a day, doubling for each day of noncompliance. Twitter still did not comply with the warrant until February 9, resulting in a total of $350,000 in fines.
Twitter appealed the ruling, but in July, an appeals court upheld Howell’s decision, the documents released Wednesday show.
Previous concerns about search warrants with gag orders attached were in the context of the FISA courts, where the warrant was served as “We are serving you this search warrant, which you must comply with, and you can’t inform anyone that such a warrant even exists, ever, including your lawyers. We’re not going to tell you why this warrant has been issued, we’re not going to tell you who the target of our search is, we’re not really even going to tell you exactly what data we want. We just kind of want all of it, hand it over. There is zero recourse for you, comply or suffer consequences.” The problem with those kinds of warrants is because there’s this secret FISA court, which is essentially a rubber stamp for overzealous secret data collection which could be used against anyone. It’s a real privacy concern.
This is not a FISA warrant. This is a regular old criminal investigation warrant. These kinds of search warrants always have a gag order, to prevent the target of the investigation from finding out there’s an investigation going on. But the warrant itself will identify that target, will identify specific data, the company can involve their lawyers, they can talk to the court about it. This is all completely normal.