Hi Dimi,

In the US, amicus briefs can have legal value as well as media value. Amici are not parties to the case, so it may not have the same weight as the parties' briefs, but it's an opportunity to add another perspective. Some advocacy organizations (like ACLU and EFF), as well as the US government, regularly file amicus briefs on potentially relevant topics.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 6:40 AM, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Stephen,

Thanks for doing this! I do think we have an interest in this case and questions about such letters have been raised even within our community.

The way I understand it, an amicus brief  is like a highly official letter of support but has no palpable legal value. Do such documents play any role for the court or is this rather targeted at the media?

Thanks!
Dimi

2015-02-18 6:56 GMT+01:00 Stephen LaPorte <slaporte@wikimedia.org>:
Hi all, 

We have joined six other organizations[1] in an amicus brief[2] in Twitter v. Holder.[3] Twitter initiated this action against the US government to establish the right to publish more detailed info about the number of national security letters it receives in its transparency report. 

[1] Aautomattic, Cloudflare, CREDOMobile, Medium, Sonic, and Wickr.

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Stephen LaPorte
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Wikimedia Foundation

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NOTICE: This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.