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WikiLeaks Supporters' Twitter Accounts Subpoenaed
HJED writes "The US Justice Department has served Twitter with a subpoena for the personal information and private messages of WikiLeaks supporters. There's a copy of the subpoena here (PDF); boing boing has a detailed article. Twitter has 3 days to turn over the information."
There is a threat to democracy, quick, suspend all civil liberties!
Individuals are entitled to say as they wish to each other in their private lives, the moment that is stopped in the name of 'national security' when they are discussing politics is when you should get the hell out.
To where is the only real question.
Looks like they are requesting personal data of an Icelandic Member of Parliment
I see a minor diplomatic incident on the horizon.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
... in the US government's life of doing whatever the hell they want without a court involved if they're caught with their pants down. But that's not what's scary - it's that this will happen without objections, other than a silent whisper from the victims here, effectively quenched by a public that wants to read more about Khloe Kardashian getting her own reality show. Heck, it hasn't even been established in a court that what has been leaked could be endangering lives. But who cares?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Twitter has known about this for >3 weeks, but they were forbidden to tell the affected persons about it. It seems like to they had to go to court just to give them this information.
News like this just makes me sad about the state of liberties in the USA.
"So this is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause."
When you have a facist/nazi/evil/whatever state you have people getting taken from their homes for not supporting the glorious leader/fuhrer/overlord/whatever and protesting?
Good times.
That's actually a bigger worry IMHO than whatever random stuff is on Twitter. The flow of cables from Wikileaks has dried up. They hardly released any at all since the new year.
Given that only 2000 of them have been released out of 250,000 they need to be stepping up the pace dramatically if they want these cables to ever see the light of day. But the exact opposite is happening. Is the biggest leak in history destined to actually be the smallest thanks to infighting and problems at Wikileaks, I wonder?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/state_dept_launching_democracy.html
..the State Department says, it's launching a Twitter contest to "tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less." The person who gets the most "unique re-tweets" will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder." ....
"Evan Williams [co-founder of Twitter] says Twitter fundamental to government"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8563109.stm
"open exchange of information will prevail in most regions, but we don't have any specific plans in China or other areas where we're blocked"
All sounded so cool when it was aimed at
Welcome back to reality. Enjoy the gems from WikiLeaks, note whats missing and welcome to the honeypot.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well, at least, I'd hand them a gigantic picture of a whale. "Sorry, your legal standing is over capacity."
I suspect that one of the problems they are having is manpower; they need the 'big' news organizations to help them sift through all the cables and see what can be released and whether those need redacting, but those organizations are now very busy handling the news around the whole affair. And the wikileaks people themselves may be a bit preoccupied with several legal procedures. There are other internal problems at wikileaks but I do not think that those are the only reasons the flow seems to dry out.
Is the biggest leak in history destined to actually be the smallest thanks to infighting and problems at Wikileaks, I wonder?
I suspect that if it gets too mired someone will just release a full dump.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So they are demanding the personal information of a Non-US citizen, that's not in the country and did not access Twitter from within the United States? Nor did any of them commit any sort of crime on US soil. Could a middle eastern country charge my wife for wearing a bikini to the beach in Florida and then demand her personal information from Twitter?
They used an air gap via a discreet postal network ect.
Its one way, you send the data out.
Their irc had SSL encryption. Once its 'public', chat away.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You can't really wiki anything that requires secrecy. It's not practical do do background checks and personal interviews with tens of thousands of volunteers.
Regardless of how you feel about it, this would seem to be a sign the US Government's tactics are working.
Twitter has been ordered to produce
The following customer or subscriber account information for each account associated with Wikileaks; ...
Were I Twitter, I would send them thousands of account records -- Every user that has ever mentioned Wikileaks via Twitter and let them sort it out themselves.
The order said they must produce the information, but did not specify that the info must not be anonymized, or mixed in with thousands of other accounts.
In case everyone has forgotten it is against the law to release classified documents in the US and in most other nations. This includes people who assisted in the release making them an accomplice to the crime. PFC Bradley Manning who stole the documents and sent them to Wiki will likely either be put to DEATH or sentence to life at hard labor.. Even if you are glad the "MAN" got his . It is still against the law and subject to the law. Until someone changes that law. Just like all the attacks on companies who pulled support of Wiki, all the ISPs have to keep information about everywhere you go for over two years. Every byte you transmit or receive. Chances are they already know who all were in on it. We are not talking about M$ or the RIAA we are talking about "A" federal government. I suggest looking up ESPIONAGE. Again why it this a surprise??
Everything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law. The connections you make, the things you read, everything. The government has too much power and by indulging in these useless social media activities, people are making themselves into potential targets by participating in them. Say you were curious about wikileaks and subscribed to Assange's twitter. Well guess what, now the government knows who you are, you are on yet another list and only because you were curious about what he had to say.
I'm not condemning social media as much as I am condemning this sort of behavior from government. But while the government IS behaving this way, people should be more careful in response.
When Yahoo executives grilled by US Congress over giving up private info of email accounts to China, which was linked to two guys jailed for "leaking state secrets."
May be twitter can use that as a defense?
What's wrong with this picture?
The fact that you posted shortened urls, that no one is gonna look at?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
The Order states among other things, that _
"IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the application and this Order are sealed until otherwise ordered by the Court, and that Twitter shall not disclose the existence of the application or this Order of the Court, or the existence of the investigation, to the listed subscriber or to any other person, unless and until authorized to do so by the Court"
_ and within a couple of hours you can find the copy all over the Net, as usual. Another bright action from the U.S. Department of Justice? Hey guys, it is a joke, isn't it?
_nice!
Why not? Supposedly the whole point of Wikileaks is to uncover secrets and to push them into the open, not to be gatekeepers over what is secret.
There is some legitimate concern over protecting the privacy of "innocent people" who may be mentioned in some of the content. I do think it may be possible to train tens of thousands of people to be able to discretely and quietly remove that kind of information which can do unintended harm, but it certainly wouldn't be easy.
What is the whole point of the secrecy anyway with Wikileaks, beyond that simple goal of processing the information to protect privacy? And more significantly, who is Wikileaks going to get "clearance" from in terms of a background check? The FBI? Department of State? Yeah, I'd like to see that happen.
Once the information is in the public, it can't be made secret again.
I'd suggest somebody read a little used document I suppose, at least if you claim to be an American: The U.S. Constitution. Most particularly the first article of amendment. What WIkileaks is doing clearly falls within the realm of that document where congress is explicitly prohibited from making a law in the first place to restrict such speech.
I think Slashcode should auto-detect these idiotic URL shorteners and either just refuse to accept them like it does for "all caps" posts and the like or preemptively down-mod the post by 2 points at least...
You can't really wiki anything that requires secrecy.
I thought the "leaks" part of wikileaks was an indication that secrecy was what was being avoided. The whole point of the project was to be a conduit through which conscientious individuals could bring information to the public; information that an agency or corporation might be trying to hide because it would expose activities that are illegal, immoral, or harmful to the public welfare.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't see how that follows. Most of the cables will be dull, and extracting good information tedious. Some initial keyword searches will pull up juicy gossip, eg "Iran". As you pick off the low hanging fruit, it will be harder and harder to find dramatic ones to release. The last one about US happy to let Japan kill whales is of passing interest, but hardly on the same level as Saudi Arabia wanting to bomb Iran. There may be a couple of bomb-shells being kept back, but probably not. The best stuff may already out there.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Not that surprising. The whole free market/neocon/neo-liberal agenda is an almost exact one on one match with the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can already predict one of the outcomes of such a psychiatric evaluation: a significantly above average percentage of sociopathic tendencies. That's bad enough but most of us have had decades of sociopathic indoctrination in the form of exposure to this political ideology (Americans more so than others) so even people who do not have intrinsic sociopathic tendencies have internalized a lot of those "values" (or rather lack thereof) through socialization and incessant cultural reinforcement.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
If this were the police state people think the US has become, they wouldn't need subpoenas. The government would have just raided the place.
Yes, let's not pretend the USG doesn't respect the rules of national and international law. I mean it's not like they say f... the law whenever it suits them, it's not like we could accuse them of torture, illegal renditions, pressuring foreign governments into discontinuing criminal investigations against American officials, distorting or plain ignoring international law, unlawful killings of foreign citizens, holding people for years without any regard for any laws whatsoever, illegally spying on American citizens.
Oh wait...
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
A law was broken? So what? You are probably breaking more than a dozen laws a week, just by living and breathing, taking shortcuts over the lane, missing some info on the tax report, etc. If someone is out to get you, they can easily find something on you, or fabricate evidence against you.
If you had any spine left in your body AC, you would ask yourself WHY someone put their LIFE on the line to disclose this information, and why someone else do EVERYTHING in their power to stop it..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
It's not just values, it's the entire skewed outlook on history and the role of the government.
It's a crazy outlook, where taxes are a violation of rights, but, you know, detaining people without charging them for crime is not.
I just want to shake the goddamn Tea Party idiots and say 'Do you actually know why we revolted from England? And if you say 'taxes' I will shoot you in head.'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It does seem that perhaps instead of modding the GP up, they ought to have posted a comment that the links are safe to look at. Probably would've been more useful. Personally, I know better than to click on links like that which don't offer a preview.
It's not like we can't accuse them of violating the law in this very case.
Mannings is being held in inhumane conditions, and has been for several months. He's forbidden from exercising in his cell, he's kept in solitary confinement, he's forbidden from having sheets and pillow.
Basically, they took every single thing that a prison can do as punishment (Although he's been a model prisoner) and as safety (He is not even slightly suicidal or dangerous and there's no grounds for denying him bedsheets) and did it to him, and then added some things that you can't do to prisoners, like forbid them from exercising in their cell.
About the only thing that's justifiably is maybe keeping him away from other prisoners. Everything else is clearly designed to punish someone who has not had his trial start.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Before everybody jumps to conclusions, from the actual subpoena, the information being turned over is contact information - names, mailing addresses, methods of payment, if applicable, ip addresses, etc., specifically excluded is the content of the tweets. In short, it appears they are 1) trying to see where the data came from -- if US, then US laws pervail, 2) how to contact individuals and 3) if money exchanged hands, from what countries did that occur.
These are all things that any investigation would look at. If this were 30 years ago, the subpoena would be to the phone companies instead of Twitter.
Since it was announced some time ago that the DOJ was investigating the leaks, there isn't any news here. If they had hacked Twitter to get the information, then that would have been newsworthy, but as it stands, it appears that the DOJ is following the laws in the US to obtain the information they are wanting in their investigation.
It's not free speech, it's treason. Saying Obama sucks is free speech but publishing secret docs is treason. The penalties include death. Aiding in treason is treason.
For military personel it is treason, for anyone else it is not. Especially when the group releasing the documents are not American, they have no duty to keep the secrets of foreign nations. Heck, you are not required to keep the secrets of your own goverment either. When the pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, and Nixon had them taken to court, the supreme court found 6-3 in favor of the New York Times publishing the documents.
"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."
—Justice Black
So in the closest case we have to Wikileaks, the supreme court ruled it was the newspapers RESPONSIBILITY to report the lies of our government to us. If you want to hide your head in the sand, obey big brother at all times, and never question your government, move to to China, they appreciate your kind there. America was founded on the idea of an open democracy by the people for the people, not some secretive government that disappears people who disagree with it for "treason". But the reason the governments are scared of Wikileaks is because a lot of people in government do things that if their people found out, would have them thrown out in seconds. Every time wikileaks releases more documents, the government starts banging the treason drum, saying it puts our troops at risk. As of yet not one single Wikileak can be blamed for causing the death of an American soldier. They said the same thing about the Afghan war document leak in august. The secretary of defense himself said "the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure." Those were military communications, and these are diplomatic cables, which are far less likely to endanger troops, and far more likely to embarrass two faced diplomats who are being caught saying one thing to the public and another in private.
The truth of the matter is 911 was an incredibly successful attack on the freedoms of Americans. No group had ever been as successful at changing American views and ideals since the founding fathers. Since then large portion of Americans can be herded wherever the government wants you by using words like "National Security" and "terrorism", people willingly give up freedoms that our grandfathers fought for and often paid for with their lives. That one attack did more to bring us closer to a 1984 style big brother controlled America, where any dissent is crushed and called treason, than any effort by any group. People willingly give up their freedoms and rights in exchange for protection from the terrorist bogeymen. Hell they don't even need to get actual protection, most people are perfectly happy with the bullshit security theatre their goverment puts in place (at great public cost) that will do nothing to stop another attack. America may once have been the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it is quickly turning into the land of the totalitarian democracy, the home of cowards who hide behind their governments skirts.
And how is exposing corruption in the government treason? To me it looks a lot more like patriotism.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Sometimes, I think I must have picked a very bad nick. I'm definately not inside the herd-think that is in here at least (phew for that ;)
I certainly will not justify government actions that is provably among those listed, and I think being scanned on social medium owned by corporations, by the government, just reeks of McCarthyism all over again. Especially so, when Wikileaks itself has broken NO LAWS. This is abuse, and will be abused, by people in high positions that want to cover their asses. If this is a new "war on wikileaks", it shows how badly these people need to be replaced before they do even more harm. They don't understand democracy and the internet, and they certainly will do everything in their power to seize more power, using every avenue to fool the public about it.
I'm not quick to believe conspiracies (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saHs6J0OXVI&feature=related for my take on most conspiracy theories), however any wise person is now taking note that the well USA is tumbling down nowadays looks very much like corporate fascism. Maybe we need to experience it, to avoid the same damages in the future that is soon to unfold? Sadly, people seem so immature these days, it seems the lesson needs to be learned the hard way.
But I'll keep on posting. Eventually, usually, my points become validated in future events, be it new technical innovations or exposure of lies and deceit.
I vividly remember seeing GWB live on TV talking about how "a new intelligence report" showed EVIDENCE of WMDs in Iraq. For some reason, my gut sometimes reacts when someone is lying, and it did. I told all my friends that this was a lie. We started SMS campaigns how this was a war on false premises.. Basically, most my friends and relatives told me this can't be true. They "must" know something Blix and UN workers don't. But of course, it was all a big fat lie to justify going to war, something GWB had wished for a long time, revenge for his dad or just to take down "one of their own guys gone bad" (bad being the "other side", by definition of course). The "intelligence report" that justified the whole Iraq war was never found, and that should tell you something. How do these guys get away with it?
Clinton had to leave office for lying about the "definition of sex" (wether oral sex is "sex" or not!), while GWB has yet to be convicted of his crimes against humanity. Oh brother! What a circus!
People are sheep, even on /.. Just because a leader says to kill, people do it without any thought of who they are, what they're doing and what the consequences are (which is wisdom).
People blindly believe in religion, one-sided science and governments because of intelligence and flawed logic. It has no relationship with how wise they are, unfortunately.
Sometimes you have to listen with your heart, not dogma, and that is the only way to truly know something intuitively.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
That would open up an attack vector on Slashdot itself by making it access potentially malicious websites. At present there is no need for Slashcode to attempt connections anywhere.
Sell to whom? The information would all be out in the open anyway. I suppose that you have hundreds of people with "check user privileges" on Wikimedia projects who discretely log and sell everything they can get to interested parties too?
It isn't as if this information is being kept from those who would screw you over. It just isn't available to "the general public".
After the two world wars, in both cases the US entered from a position of originally not wanting to get involved in foreign conflicts, the US went to Vietnam, the debarkle that was Iran/Iraq, Central America, Libya, Iraq again twice. Oh and Isreal.
In the case of the second Iraq war, it was so obviously a case that, had it occurred on a scale of individual citizens, would be called armed robbery. We know the claims of WMDs were invented, we know the people in the administration who hatched the plan had interests in arms companies who profited from US taxpayers and oil companies who profited from the stolen oil fields. I'm not saying Saddam Hussien was a good man, I just think the evil fuckwit puppeteers of Bush are worse. Certainly responsible for far more innocent deaths in the name of a buck. This is why they don't like Wikileaks. It continues to erode bullshit cover stories for crimes against humanity.
At the moment, yes Chinese growth would stagnate, but not for much longer. The middle class is growing. If they were to insist on balancing trade, the US would be bankrupt. Does your assessment of debt include balance of trade figures?
I too have spent some time in Europe and worked extensively with Americans and Europeans and I find the opposite regarding ignorance and bigotry, but then for someone who sucks up the propaganda it might be hard to objectively determine what is ignorance...
I don't therefore I'm not.