Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?
Who's applauding, though? From what I can tell, it's mostly just a stunned silence punctuated by occasional mutterings of "wait, isn't this wrong?".
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.
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.
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?
Mosey around the intertubz for a while. Slashdot has been keeping the discussion "reasonable" in comparison to some of the other forums out there. Seems to be quite a few people who would like nothing better then to send anyone even remotely involved straight to gitmo for some "enhanced questioning."
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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.
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...
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/
The US has had a problem with kangaroo courts for quite some time now, it's just that in recent years they've been less opaque than usual. There's a view that the government would never accuse an innocent person of committing a felony, so an acquittal is really just a failure of the justice system. Not to mention that "justice delayed is justice denied." Or some such bullshit.
There's a lot of people out there that are either deluded into thinking that they can't accidentally be accused or don't care as long as one of the accused is actually guilty and is willing to toss the others under the bus to get a conviction.
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?
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.