OFFLINE

oh that's right, only when it pertains to the u.s. government. friggin hypocrites...


Two prominent WikiLeaks supporters in the Netherlands and Iceland are consulting U.S. lawyers about ways to stop the Justice Department getting their Twitter records in a probe into the leak of secret documents.

Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch Internet activist who worked with WikiLeaks last year, said he and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's Parliament, want to quash a December 14 U.S. court order requiring Twitter to turn over their account records to U.S. prosecutors.

U.S. authorities are investigating the publication last year of thousands of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website set up by Australian Julian Assange.

The court order instructed Twitter to turn over to federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, all account records created by the social media site since November 1, 2009 for Gonggrijp, Jonsdottir, Assange, and Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the documents.

Gonggrijp, contacted by Reuters, said he first learned that the U.S. government wanted to obtain his records when he got an e-mail dated January 7 from Twitter informing him of the court order.

In that message, Twitter said it would respond to the order in 10 days unless a motion was filed to quash it or some other resolution of the government demand was reached.

OFFLINE

So are they looking to see if they previewed the leak in twitter?  I haven't really been following this too much.  So the WikiLeaks people don't want their records released since the US is looking into (probably) additional charges... hmmm certainly does sound like a bit o' double standard.

OFFLINE

Well, I'd be a bit wary of this until I saw the court order - as in, what law was broken that are they trying to get the court order for evidence against? Are they actually bringing pre-existing charges against these people or is ti a case of tellint Twitter "give us their data so we can figure out what crime we can charge these guys with" - which could be a moot point actually, as given that 3 of these people aren't US citizens and are not based in the US, how was the crime committed under US jurisdiction?

At least however it looks like things are going though at least a semblance of the legal process, rather than the extra-legal ways the US govt was trying to "kill" Wikileaks after the last set of leaks went out (blocking the servers, killing the paypal accounts etc). Read a good article on it at the time actually:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/12/wikileaks-and-the-long-haul/

OFFLINE

It doesn't make sense to me for foreign nationals to be able to use US courts to stop an investigation of a US based company - unless, of course, there is something in US law that permits this sort of nonsense.

OFFLINE

Originally Posted by Russell Jones:
It doesn't make sense to me for foreign nationals to be able to use US courts to stop an investigation of a US based company - unless, of course, there is something in US law that permits this sort of nonsense.

But the US govt isn't investigating twitter, they're just trying to get the records from twitter for those foreign nationals.