Let’s assume a government asks Facebook about private information. In the US, it can do so via with secret courts, so the people being surveilled cannot know about and oppose it. In that case, Facebook is the only one who could do something about it: they can do so by arguing that revealing that information would put them in legal trouble. How that works, I have no idea: the court is secret, so is the idiosyncrasies of its appeal process.<p>The possibility that Facebook could be attacked makes the lawyers unhappy: their job includes minimising risks, and this is a big one given the PR around it. The ability to oppose abusive requests makes the (very many) privacy-concerned employees happy: they really don’t like spending their career helping ideas they strongly oppose. That’s why you can have contradictory statements.<p>The real issue here is the existence of secret courts, and administrative processes that exclude judges and the basic legal protection (guaranteed by the Fourth amendment in the US). Facebook can’t really oppose <i>that</i> without exposing itself to spin around being pro-terrorists (which is mind-boggling when you think about how loudly the same people talk about “Freedom”). Allowing an appeal and maintaining needed discretion in certain matters is a delicate problem, but hardly a new one in law.<p>It sounds to me (not a legal expert) that what would be preferable is to have a Public defender for privacy, fluent in legal and technical matter, who be made privy to secret decision, and not allowed to contact the people being targeted before they know about the surveillance. The ACLU sounds like they could recommend good candidates. A judge should be able to do that, and Congress at a higher level — but whomever was in charge lately has dropped the ball quite dramatically, being both lied to and far too lenient in what they knew.