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WASHINGTON • Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin has been as aggressive as any member of Congress in pressing technology companies to promote Internet freedoms. Last year, he lectured Facebook about the need to protect users from authoritarian regimes.

Today, Durbin focused on Twitter, the microblogging giant that announced last month that it had begun censoring content in countries that restrict Internet use.

Durbin, a Democrat, chairs a Senate Judiciary subcommittee with a wide perview: the Constitution, civil rights and human rights. He is joined in his request to Twitter by Tom Coburn, R-Okla., among the Senate's most conservative members.

A letter from Durbin and Coburn to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo this morning began by praising the San Francisco-based company for providing "an important tool to democracy and human rights activists."

But it raised a series of questions such as what procedures Twitter will use when it receives a censorship request from a foreign government.

Twitter was vague on details when the company declared in a blog post on Jan. 26: "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively witthold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world."

The Durbin-Coburn letter asks, among other things, how Twitter determines whether requests from presumably authoritarian governments are valid.

Among other questions to Twitter:

• Do you make an assessment of whether complying with such a request may put the human rights of the Twitter user at risk?

• Do you assess whether such a request complies with international human rights laws?

• Where do you store the private information of your users?

The senators also pressed Twitter to join the Global Network Initiative, an alliance of Internet and technology companies who have agreed to submit to a voluntary code of conduct that involves protecing human rights.

Twitter has thus far has balked, responding two years ago that the company hadn't had the time to "fully evaluate" the initiative but, initially, considered it "better suited to bigger companies."

In renewing the request to join, Durbin and Coburn observed that Twitter has grown to the point where it has users in nearly every country in the world.

"Twitter clearly faces the significant human rights issues that the (initiative) is designed to help companies address, namely government pressure to violate the freedom of expression and user privacy," the letter reads.

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Durbin wants explanation of Twitter's new censorship policy