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tangent4ronpaul
01-08-2011, 04:08 AM
http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/08/us.wikileaks.twitter/?hpt=T1

(CNN) -- A member of parliament from Iceland who is connected to WikiLeaks says U.S. officials have subpoenaed information about her from the social media website Twitter.

"Department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info -- i got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over," Birgitta Jonsdottir said on her Twitter account.
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In the documents, a federal judge orders Twitter to hand over information about Jonsdottir, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning and others.

Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch man who was also named in the documents, also posted on his website what appears to be the message he received from Twitter regarding the Department of Justice subpoena.

http://rop.gonggri.jp/

US DOJ subpoenas my twitter account info

It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that somewhere, far away, people are thinking about you. Last night I received this rather interesting e-mail from twitter:

Kessel, Jan-07 11:20 am (PST):
Dear Twitter User:

We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @rop_g. A copy of the legal process is attached. The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account.

Please be advised that Twitter will respond to this request in 10 days from the date of this notice unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the legal process has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.

To respond to this notice, please e-mail us at <removed>.

This notice is not legal advice. You may wish to consult legal counsel about this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation <contact info removed> or the ACLU <contact info removed>.

Sincerely,

Twitter Legal

While I was still thinking about whether to write about this or talk to my lawyer first, I was told the mail and attachments were already published by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, including the original subpoena dated December 14, 2010. It says the DOJ wants twitter’s records on Jacob Appelbaum (a.k.a. ioerror), Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and yours truly. This all because, apparently, “the Court finds that the applicant has offered specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Plenty of thoughts to be had over this one. For one: in a case like this you’d think they would check the spelling of my last name. Furthermore I would have guessed that the US government has more discreet and effective ways of getting my IP-number and credit card details, which is essentially all this would get them.

Also it appears that twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in. For those who wonder if twitter ignored a court order by telling me: I did get a second PDF with a January 5 order to unseal the subpoena so that twitter could tell me, which is quite possibly the result of some communication between twitter and the DOJ. Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me.

tangent4ronpaul
01-08-2011, 01:25 PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/08/wikileaks-calls-google-facebook-us-subpoenas

WikiLeaks demands Google and Facebook unseal US subpoenas

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2011/1/8/1294494534120/WIkiLeaks-Juilan-Assange--007.jpg

WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.

Amid strong evidence that a US grand jury has begun a wideranging trawl for details of what networks and accounts WikiLeaks used to communicate with Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, some of those named in the subpoena said they would fight disclosure.

"Today, the existence of a secret US government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain," WikiLeaks said in a statement.

The writ, approved by a court in Virginia in December, demands that the San Franscisco based micro-blogging site hand over all details of five individuals' accounts and private messaging on Twitter – including the computers and networks used.

They include WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Manning, Icelandic MP Brigitta Jonsdottir and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp. Three of them – Gonggrijp, Assange and Jonsdottir – were named as "producers" of the first significant leak from the US cables cache: a video of an Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and journalists in Baghdad.

The broad-reaching legal document also targets an account held by Jacob Appelbaum, a US computer programmer whose computer and phones were examined by US officials in July after he was stopped returning from Holland to America.
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The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities.

WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment.
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The specific clause of the Patriot act used to acquire the subpoena is one that the FBI has described as necessary for "obtaining such records [that] will make the process of identifying computer criminals and tracing their internet communications faster and easier".

The subpoena itself is an unusual one known as a 2703(d). Recently a federal appeals court ruled this kind of order was insufficient to order the disclosure of the contents of communication. Significantly, however, that ruling is binding in neither Virginia – where the Twitter subpoena was issued – nor San Francisco where Twitter is based.

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We now have 4 threads on the same subject - mergie, mergie please...

-t

HOLLYWOOD
01-08-2011, 01:47 PM
I already...

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?275058-US-Gov.-Secret-Investigations-WIKILEAKS-Donors-Twitter-Supporters-Activists-Subpoenaed