Showing posts with label subscribers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label subscribers. Show all posts

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Twitter WikiLeaks Legal and Subpoena Update

In violation of due process rights, U.S. Magistrate Theresa Buchanan backs U.S. Department of Justice request for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's friends' online records.

The U.S. Magistrate with judicial power over the U.S. government investigation into WikiLeaks has issued a new court order, which affirms a previous secret court order demanding WikiLeaks-related discovery from user accounts on social media journalism sites, such as Twitter, which have no known connection to WikiLeaks other than for typical online social networking activities, such as ''following.''

The Hon. Buchanan denied legal challenges to her previous court order by prominent owners of Twitter accounts. The magistrate said that U.S. government prosecutors were not seeking the "content of the communications," according to Reuters.

Even though Twitter account owners may follow each other on the website, it does not mean that the account owners are, by association, automatically engaged in questionable online behaviour, some online privacy activists say. There is a freedom of assembly in the United States, whether it be in an assembly hall or over a social media website.

In a further worrisome development, the magistrate also invalidated legal arguments that if Twitter were to provide to prosecutors the Internet Protocol addresses of Twitter account owners, then the act of unreasonable disclosure would constitute a "violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure because it revealed their location," reported Reuters.

"Buchanan originally signed an order for prosecutors seeking about seven months of information from Twitter, including who they communicated with, who they followed, and who followed them. They also requested information about how they logged in, which could identify their location at the time," wrote the Reuters reporter Jeremy Pelofsky.

As reported before, what would the U.S. government be gaining from conducting a court-sanctioned surveillance for this kind of social media account information? Not for nothing, by focusing on subscribers and connection records, among other things, the U.S. government is casting a wide, indiscriminate net into cyberspace, and it is hoping to pull in something -- legal or otherwise, relevant or otherwise, applicable or otherwise. There is no focus to the court order ; its only objectives are to spy and to collect surveillance over both foreigners, over which the U.S. may have no jurisdiction, and citizens, who are being denied due process.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

WikiLeaks Twitter Subpoena Denies Subscribers Their Right To Due Process

The First item listed in the secret Order signed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia demands that Twitter turn over ''subscriber names'' of the five individuals associated with WikiLeaks.

On Saturday night, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed included this ominous message : ''Too late to unfollow; trick used is to demand the lists, dates and IPs of all who received our twitter messages.''

Not only have U.S. Justice Department prosecutors cast the data mining aspect of their court order on Twitter to include foreigners, but now prosecutors are trying to ensnare mere subscribers (or, in Twitter jargon, ''followers'') of the five individuals associated with WikiLeaks.

Whereas, the three foreigners, who are targets of the prosecutors' surveillance, have the option to object to the court order served on Twitter, the fact that followers have no say in fighting the reasonableness of the U.S. government's court order call into question the true scope of the legal witch hunt.

Since there appears to be a weak legal underpinning to the court orders, then, more and more, the investigations by U.S. prosecutors appear to be mere acts of retaliation against foreign political dissidents and WikiLeaks.

And caught in the middle are the followers on Twitter. If the followers are foreigners, then a U.S. court may have no jurisdiction over the free speech activities of those foreigners. And if the followers are Americans, then the Americans should be given due process, namely, an opportunity to challenge the court order. Except for harassment or retaliation, what is the purpose for the U.S. government to know who are the Twitter followers ? Certainly, there is no legal reasoning for the U.S. government to know who are the Twitter followers.