Two Wikileaks activists, an Icelandic politician and a U.S. computer programmer, said today that the U.S. government has demanded that Twitter turn over information about them.
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of 63 members of Iceland’s national parliament, said this afternoon she was notified that the U.S. Department of Justice sent a subpoena requesting information about her account since November 1, 2009.
“I think I am being given a message, almost like someone breathing in a phone,” Jónsdóttir said in a Twitter message.
A note from the Wikileaks Twitter account around 8 p.m. PT this evening said, without providing details, that “there are many Wikileaks supporters listed in the U.S. Twitter subpoena.” A Justice Department spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
Another Wikileaks volunteer, Jacob Appelbaum, who gave a keynote speech at a hacker conference last summer on behalf of the document-leaking organization, also said that “my account information has been subpoenaed.” Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen who’s a developer for the Tor Project, has been briefly detained at the border and people in his address book have been hassled at airports.
The U.S. government began an criminal investigation of Wikileaks and spokesman Julian Assange last July after the Web site began releasing what would become a deluge of confidential military and State Department files.
In November, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the probe is “ongoing,” and a few weeks later an attorney for Assange said he had been told that a grand jury had been empaneled in Alexandria, Va. The subpoena sent to Twitter was filed under seal by the Justice Department, Jónsdóttir told Wired.com, on December 14 in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va.
A Twitter representative declined to comment on any specific subpoenas, but told CNET: “To help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so.”
Twitter is not legally required to notify its users, but voluntarily chose the more privacy-protective approach. A subpoena gives recipients such as e-mail providers or messaging services the discretion to divulge information immediately or notify its users and provide them with the opportunity to fight the subpoena in court. (Twitter’s law enforcement guidelines say “our policy is to notify users of requests for their information prior to disclosure.”)
Jónsdóttir said she was given 10 days to oppose the subpoena and is contacting attorneys in the United States. Appelbaum said, without elaborating, that he has seen a letter confirming the subpoena but has not been contacted by Twitter. (Twitter general counsel Alexander Macgillivray said the company had attempted to contact him but had been unsuccessful.)
Jónsdóttir was a close ally of Assange and supported efforts to turn the small north Atlantic nation into a virtual data haven. A New Yorker profile last year, for instance, depicted Jónsdóttir as almost an accidental politician whose self-described political views are mostly anarchist and who volunteered with Wikileaks.
At one point, the profile recounted, Assange was unshaven and his hair was a mess: “He was typing up a press release. Jonsdottir came by to help, and he asked her, ‘Can’t you cut my hair while I’m doing this?’ Jonsdottir walked over to the sink and made tea. Assange kept on typing, and after a few minutes she reluctantly began to trim his hair.”
Jónsdóttir even invited Assange to a reception — this was before last year’s series of high-profile releases — held at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in the capital of Reykjavik. “He certainly had fun at the party,” Jónsdóttir told the U.K. Telegraph. “He went as my guest. I said it would be a bit of a prank to take him and see if they knew who he was. I don’t think they had any idea.”
But after Assange became embroiled in allegations of sexual assault, which have led to the Swedish government attempting to extradite him from the U.K., Jónsdóttir said the organization should find a spokesman who’s not such a controversial figure.
“Wikileaks should have spokespeople that are conservative and not strong persons, rather dull, so to speak, so that the message will be delivered without the messenger getting all the attention,” Jónsdóttir said at the time. Although she said she did not believe the allegations, she suggested that Assange step aside, which he did not do.
It’s not entirely clear what the Justice Department is seeking from Twitter.
If other federal subpoenas are any indication, however, this will ask for all information associated with an account, including current and previous e-mail addresses and Internet addresses used to log into Twitter.com. It’s unclear how long Twitter stores full IP addresses in its logs; Google, for instance, performs a partial anonymization after six months.
Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027893-281.html?part=rsstag=feedsubj=PrivacyInc.
Category: Social Media Threats