On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by Elon Musk’s X Corp. to examine whether the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, may make public the frequency with which federal law enforcement requests user data for investigations related to national security.

The justices declined to consider X’s appeal of a lower court decision that said the FBI’s limitations on the company’s ability to discuss the investigations publicly did not infringe upon its First Amendment right to free speech.

X had stated that it was “critical” that the justices take up the issue to set down precise guidelines for the timing and manner in which tech companies might discuss requests from the government for private user data for surveillance.

X’s attorneys stated in their Supreme Court petition that “history demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.”

Musk described it as “disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter” in a post on X. The lengthy legal dispute began in 2014, years before Musk bought Twitter in 2022, following the 2013 disclosure by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of the scope of American monitoring and eavesdropping activities.

The U.S. government agreed to loosen restrictions on what tech companies, such as Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Google, Microsoft (MSFT.O), Twitter, and Facebook-owner Meta Platforms (META.O), could reveal about data that the government had sought in connection with national security investigations in response to the public outcry over the revelations from Snowden’s leaks.

The updated policy, unveiled in 2014, permitted businesses to reveal approximate frequencies of national security-related information requests rather than precise numbers.

A statute adopted by Congress in 2015 permitted firms to reveal some details regarding the frequency with which they got orders and letters under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sought user data. These were referred to as “national security letters.” However, they were still limited to doing so in general ranges rather than precise numbers. Companies may reveal government requests for data in increments of 100 or 1,000, depending on the kind of report they release.

In its complaint, Twitter, or X, as it was then called, said it wanted to go further and reveal how many times in the previous six months the government had served it with information-seeking national security orders.

Before filing the lawsuit, it had provided a draft report to the FBI that would do just that, but the FBI determined the material in the study was secret and could not be made available to the public.

In March 2023, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed the trial judge’s decision to dismiss Twitter’s case, stating that the “government’s restriction on Twitter’s speech is narrowly tailored in support of a compelling government interest.”