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US Judge Orders Twitter To Give Up WikiLeaks Data
cultiv8 writes "A US judge Friday ordered Twitter to hand over the data of three users in contact with the activist site WikiLeaks. 'US Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan rejected arguments raised by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a host of private attorneys representing the Twitter account holders, who had asserted that their privacy was protected by federal law, the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment. Buchanan rejected each of the arguments in quick succession, saying that there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available." The account holders have "no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses," she said, and federal privacy law did not apply because prosecutors were not seeking contents of the communications.'"
If somebody at Twitter deleted those accounts, or at least deleted the identifying information and it couldn't clearly be established who had done it... what could the US government do to Twitter as a corporation? Even a large fine would probably be worth it in the long run from all the goodwill and positive feedback they'd get from their users.
saying that there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available."
Its like McCarthyism all over again.
I thought the point of the first amendment argument was that this sort of action would have a chilling effect on free speech, not that the twitter users were having their free speech rights directly violated...
Palm trees and 8
I can't wait for his time in office to end.
Gitmo will be closed and indefinite detention will end.
There will be no more illegal wiretaps.
oh boy. one great display of freedom after another - freedom to commit war crimes and hide it from public that is. and it is not treason to commit war crimes behind the backs of the elected people - but to let people know it - or, even more, people TO know it.
Read radical news here
2008, let's see:
Progressive President, Democrats in charge of the US House and Senate.
Soooo, Patriot Act not repealed, illegal wiretaps not stopped, the prison at Guantanamo stays around.
Get it through your heads: Even putting the "preferred" people in charge of the US government - it still acts as your enemy.
Will you PLEASE stop voting to fund the beast that is the US government? Without the money it feeds on, it won't be able to steal your freedoms.
Because if it isn't clear by now that supporting higher taxes for "investments" isn't going to help anyone but the political class and their rich hangers-on, you've been duped.
The right to speak anonymously in order to protect one's self from retaliation from individuals or oppressive, tyrannical or vengeful governments is an ESSENTIAL part of the first amendment protection. So the judge is simply wrong about this. Having the right to speech is only part of the first amendment. Having the right to free speech without fear is the rest of it.
They *are* part of the government, why do people think they will act in the best interest of the people and not the government? The case and ruling are biased, a third party should be making the decision.
Question to web 2.0 companies: Why are you keeping logs of which user logged in from which IP address in the first place? That is, if it's not out of some misplaced sense of "patriotism", or do the Feds make you do it?
For GeoIP ads, that a problem for the ad server serving the ad to the person reading a tweet, not the tweeter. And if it's for geographical information on the tweeter, just do the GeoIP lookup upon signup, and you don't need to keep the IP data.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
First, the point is not that this will effect the participants ability to say whatever they said. The point is that it will effect future participants willingness to say things. It's about the chilling effect, not about the given participants first amendment rights exactly.
Secondly, I do have a privacy interest in my IP address. If I didn't, then why do services like Tor exist to hide it? If nobody cared about that, then nobody would use Tor, but many people clearly do. So people do have a privacy interest in their IP address. So the 4th amendment does apply.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This.
>there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available."
The tweets are already published. If they weren't illegal what are you pursuing them for?
So, somebody tweets something in support of Wikileaks, you want to hunt them down to send them to Guantan, and there's no 1st amendment issue.
At this rate Tunisia (which just abolished its state security) and Egypt (whose people raided their state security HQ) will be freer than the "land of the free".
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
may as well fuss over censorship, & unwarranted prose/perse/cution? what did we expect? this HAS happened before. killing? deception? fear based disregard/ill will/mindless aggression/attacks? normal? yikes almighty. get ready to learn something(s)?
eat cake
going down? bravery? rats won't do it, & they have more 'nerve' than a genetically altered corepirate nazi freemason?
you still have the (growing) right to remain silent. so that's good? we look like a 'black hole' (void) forming from upstairs. that's (void) where nothing is clear, & everything that goes there dies?
The problem with this incident is not that the government might get users' names from Twitter. Because *someone* already has that information, and much more, about all of us. The real issue is government's ability to misuse that data without consequence.
Privacy is not the right to be left alone, nor is it the right to hide your information from others. Information cannot be contained for long -- WikiLeaks and wiretaps alike demonstrate this. Privacy is, instead, the right not to have your information wielded inappropriately against you.
The solution to this problem isn't "omg delete all the files" or "omg hide from the evil government." The solution is to put in place transparency regulations that keep government honest by keeping its activities where we can see them.
Don't blame me. I voted for Nader.
A harsh assessment of the political history, examining Democrats, Republicans, and corporations should show most people that in general politicans are members of the financial elite first, and second, act in an eternal political nonsense scenario - where all versions of the facts and opinions are allowed to be discussed, except if they are of any consequence that matters. And so great political theater is made, for example, of the extra thousands in salary or benfits of some group, but no discussion of ever made of the billions that never change direction. The real bosses have big propaganda signs outdoors in every country. Every citizen must give them money every day for everything they do. And if they play their cards right, they hide their misdeeds and advertise many virtues in propaganda-marketing, and the citizens will actually thank them for being the big boss, and being loving and generous and giving them meaningless gadgets and options by the thousands. The corporations are the real bosses, for both criminal and legal business. The marketing companies are the propaganda, and the politicans are the front men, yes men, the diversion, and the occasional fall guy to be sacrificed. Voting is performed by the propaganda and front men occasionally, but the bosses positions are not up for election, they are choosing the allowed candidates. If we want real democracy, we need to fight more for it, voting among a grotesque clown and a polite clown is just a cruel joke. Protesting on the street, putting up signs, doing things yourself is a fundamental part of democracy, and if you and nobody you know does it, it's because there is no real democracy, it's a managed show. That's the most democracy any country today has achieved, a managed show.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Is all that schooling just there to beat the logic and decency out of them?
Treason is a hanging offense: Will the judge hang? I cry for America
Not a chance. Treason is very narrowly defined in the US Constitution. You'd first need to classify her court or the Department of Justice as enemies to the United States. I'm not a lawyer, but I think you'd need both Congress and the Judicial system to cooperate in the effort, or maybe a plurality of state governments.
("States", "them", "their" -- Article 3 Section 3, read literally, doesn't refer to the federal government specifically. An argument could be made that any plurality of states could do...)
Sounds like a tacky comedy.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Let her know - http://courthouseforum.com/forums/worstjudge.php?id=1862
Question to web 2.0 companies: Why are you keeping logs of which user logged in from which IP address in the first place? That is, if it's not out of some misplaced sense of "patriotism", or do the Feds make you do it?
I can't speak for other web site owners, but I track the IP addresses of every visitor on my site for two primary reasons:
First, so that if someone tries to hack my site, I can find them, report them to their ISP, and prosecute them if necessary. This also applies to defacement. As my sites are social-networky, if someone does something to try to deface them, I track the IP address so that I can deny it, or if necessary, a range of addresses, to the sites to keep them from just signing up with throwaway accounts and continuing to deface the site.
Second, it is included as part of the session information as a security measure. If someone attempts to connect to my site using a session (which entails not having to type his or her username and password to log in every time), the site matches the session ID against the IP address also to make sure the user is connecting via that session from the same address. If it is a different address, that is an indication that someone may be trying to hijack someone else's session and it redirects back to the login page.
I get your point, though, and for what it's worth, I don't keep the information for long; a week or two at most before it's rolled up into aggregate statistics regarding site visit trending and deleted.
One of the things that seems to be happening here is that USA Federal case law is beginning to define the difference between privacy, with its constitutional protections, and anonymity, which for all practical purposes only came into existence with the rise of the Internet. That is, before the Internet, there really was no effective way to publish anything to a large audience without leaving a trail that would expose the author's identity to anyone who cared to do the leg work.
So this anonymity thing is a new thing under the law. The judge here is saying that anonymity has no constitutional protection; if there are technical ways of removing the anonymous mask without violating protected privacy rights, it is legal to do so; and that what the prosecutors in this case are proposing would meet that test.
My personal feelings are that Wikilieaks and similar vigilante mechanisms have done much more good than harm, so far. However this is an unstable situation: the vigilantes are essentially a mob of the elite early adopters, but as others begin to pick up the skills, the mob grows bigger, loses its elitism, and becomes a monster enforcing the tyranny of the majority. We need to have the law find ways to work in the digital territories such that it can do its job of protecting the rights of individual mavericks from being trampled by the witless majority. Much as I may not like the immediate fallout from this judge's actions, splitting the concept of anonymity away from privacy may be a good early baby step toward a reasonable future.
Will
seems like excessive repetition doesn't help? so, the media installed, resident memory- flash 'upgrades' are working? that's good? creators are 'en-route'. too many to lose here.. sheesh
They're being investigated because of what they claimed to have done, not because of their opinions. The warrants have nothing to do with free speech. In that context, the judge's ruling makes sense. Read the article about the accusations,
"The accounts at issue include those of Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with Wikileaks' release of a classified U.S. military video; Seattle-based Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum; and Dutch hacker and XS4ALL Internet provider co-founder Rop Gonggrijp. The order also sought records relating to Assange and suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, who appear not to have contested it (prosecutors say nobody "associated with" WikiLeaks has filed an objection)."
If the warrants were just about their opinions, a large amount of people would be under investigation. Rather, the investigators are following leads into how the classified information got leaked.
Means assumed guilt.
Great. So when do the black vans just start picking up people randomly?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
.... my IP is 192.168.1.2. I'd have given 127.0.0.1, but you guys are just too smart to fall for that.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now personally I'd assumed that the framers of the constitution were describing these rights as extending to all human beings. "ALL men yadda yadda." Certainly at any time those rights have been limited (Mostly for women and black people) they were considered to be not entirely "human" up until the point they were defined as such. Therefore, the gitmo defense implies that foreigners are not human. The Geneva convention attempts to elevate foreigners to "human" status and treaties are supposed to have the same weight as the constitution in such matters, but there's the loophole that we consider that to be true only inasmuch as it's convenient.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If the court says the information is already public, well, then the government already has it.
It is twisted logic to say you have to give the government information they already have... and really, that is NOT what the court is saying.
The court is saying give the government information that they don't already have, that is not public, that was assumed to be private and certainly not compiled, diced and sliced for unintended analysis followed by prosecution.
Ummm, boy, good thing we have Obama, or this kind of thing could happen!
Already made their posts publicly available? What a dumb f&^%
hahaha...oh well...I can't believe how absolutely hilarious this whole thing is.
Instructive thread sir!
This is a key part that keeps getting passed over in all this mess - "Let's get a court order to request info that won't do anything at all ... er... well since none of the 5 edge cases of ip's apply to you, it's you!"
Also, we started our grand adventure on the net expecting all the backend stuff to stay private / discarded. Now this is playing out like a reality show.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wow, you found another one - someone groups trying to re-write the language to over-broaden existing words so that actions can be punished more. It's the newer version of the copyright infringement-stolen one, except there's no copyright on govt info (yet!), so now we're seeing "leak to 1 person = not a leak; it's only a leak when it hits Public Media."
Newspapers have been doing the Leaked Sensitive Info game for decades, so only now they're trying to go after the new crew on the block!?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Is the following scenario plausible?
/TempDirectory (Probably should have used the "cp" command.)
/TempDirectory is deleted. (oops)
Sometime close to midnight some newbie in the Twitter IT department is tasked with copying the data to a CD ROM for the Feds:.
23:59:
$cd TwitterLogsWithEvidence
$mv TwitterLogsWithEvidence
00:00:
Backgound system runs daily system clean-up routine and all data in
Direct Messages, which are private exchanges between people on Twitter, are not publicly available. That ruling by the judge is in error.
(Bitter)
When a judge, then an appellate judge, then a supreme judge waves their hands, it becomes true.
If the sophistry is upheld, that also becomes true.
Or maybe only Truthy.
(/Bitter)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I was thinking more of the RIAA type stuff and plausible deniability defense. Which stands at least in the UK and I'm not sure what was going on in the states.
But if the judge knows that the IP doesn't actually directly link to a person etc... then well he'd have no reason not to let them have it...
The reason for the request should come into it... just if the data is or is not protected and why.
I rather see IP addresses not being linkable to people.. VPN, work network etc... without actually knowing if it is connected directly to a real person or not.. then how the hell do you make any judgement in favor of protecting something that isn't?
could someone request that I hand over a sock since they think it may have some connection to a murder trial... regardless of it does or not?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Here are the three IP addresses in question: 192.168.0.1, 127.0.0.1, and 10.2.133.7
Now quit bitchin' and get on with life!
They have a Twitter account and think their tweets are private and the worse, they have immunity from whatsoever consequences?
They have a Facebook account and they think their lives are private, that they own their content and that it won't eventually get used against them?
They have a gmail account and think that when they delete their emails they actually get deleted?
Expect more and more "free" services to emerge so that more data is amassed and the line between 'customer' and 'citizen' gets blurred so much that you won't be able to get any protection from constitutions, 'laws' or the mere fact you're doing the same 'innocent' things as hundreds of millions of others do.
We're all guilty and soon we won't be able to be proven innocent, the legal fees will be prohibitive. It sure is not just a US thing, it's a global trend.
The social network was hosted in your hour and all your friends houses
A judge acting in the interested the powerful. Nothing new.
Congress can put anything they want into a bill, and it doesn't change one simple fact: Guantanamo Bay is a military installation, and Obama is Commander in Chief. If Obama chooses to give the order "get everyone out of Guantanamo", there is absolutely nothing that Congress can do about it.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Except when the IP can be used to identify your ISP and/or roughly geographical location, so they can hunt you down like a rabid animal. Oh yeah, suddenly I'm thinking people really are interested in the privacy of their IP addresses.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
If they are European, Twitter has to refuse. It has to be agreed from a EU court in their jurisdiction.
Because the masque of Empire is slipping.
For a technical site, we seem to be spending a lot of time arguing about the legal and moral aspects of this. How about the technical ones instead? If you want to say something publicly and anonymously over the internet, in such a way that your government can't get your identity, what methods are there? Freenet? MixMaster? Remember Beale Screamer?