Lawyers Seek To Block Twitter Data Handover

Lawyers on Friday asked a US judge to overturn a ruling from earlier this month, forcing Twitter to hand over account details to the US Department of Justice, in a case related to the US federal government’s ongoing investigation of Wikileaks.

The appeal (PDF) seeks to overturn a ruling that would give the US government access to Twitter account details for three users who had contact with Wikileaks. The government also wants Twitter to provide information on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and on Bradley Manning, a US Army private charged with providing data to Wikileaks.

Private information

Twitter is being asked to provide account information such as mailing addresses and session logs to the government.

In the Friday appeal, lawyers representing the Twitter account holders said the request violates US federal law, threatens the clients’ right to privacy and intrudes upon their freedom of association.

The three users, American computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament; and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch computer programmer, are supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU and the EFF argue that the order would require Twitter to divulge all direct messages, even those unrelated to WikiLeaks. It “has a chilling effect not only on the parties’ speech and association rights, but on the rights of Twitter users in general,” the organisations said in a joint statement.

The brief also renewed a request that the court unseal documents filed by the Department of Justice in the case.

Judge Theresa Buchanan earlier rejected arguments that the disclosure invades privacy, saying that the users had already made their user information public via Twitter.

Twitter limited the data to cover the period of 15 November 2009 to 1 June 2010.

The civil rights groups argued that the court’s order will give the government overly broad access to users’ private information.

“Our privacy in our Internet communications should not be so easily sacrificed,” said the EFF in a statement earlier this month.

The ruling could have implications that go far beyond the current Wikileaks case, according to EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.

“With so much of our digital private information being held by third parties – whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter – the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself,” Cohn stated earlier this month.

Ongoing investigation

As part of the US government’s investigation into WikiLeaks, a court ordered Twitter, in mid-December, to give details of accounts owned by supporters of the whistle-blower site. Twitter has protested against the subpoena and informed the individuals whose account information has been requested, while raising the possibility that other social networking players have received similar orders.

The US Department of Justice obtained a subpoena for the micro-blogging site on 14 December, requesting records going back to 1 November 2009, that are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The recent WikiLeaks controversy began when the site started publishing a trove of US diplomatic cables in late November. The release of the documents has touched off months of debate and prompted WikiLeaks supporters and opponents alike to air their differences with denial-of-service attacks while businesses such as PayPal cut ties with the whistle-blower site.

In December, Assange was arrested in the UK on charges of sexual assault originating in Sweden. He is currently awaiting the result of his extradition appeal.

In a statement, WikiLeaks has reportedly said that some of the people named in the subpoena were key figures in helping WikiLeaks make public US military videos of a 2007 airstrike that killed Iraqi civilians.