As you may recall, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, various tech companies got into a bit of a spat with the US government over the right to disclose FISA orders received under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. These orders are what made up the PRISM program that got so much early attention, with some early reports implying, incorrectly, that the tech companies had given the NSA full access to their systems under the program. The reality is that the 702 program includes specific FISA court orders for access to specific information, not blanket access. What‘s unknown is just how narrow or broad those orders are, and that‘s partly because of a gag order that comes with any of those FISA court orders. In response, a bunch of those tech companies filed a lawsuit arguing they had a First Amendment right to reveal the number of orders they had received.