Icelandic MP To Challenge US Court Ruling On Twitter Privacy

JabrTheHut writes "The Guardian has a story of how Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, is challenging the U.S.'s acquisition of Twitter account information, IP addresses, mailing addresses and even bank information. The U.S. says it wanted these details to help with its investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Jonsdottir said, 'This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media. We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the U.S. authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It's absolutely unacceptable.'"

Comments

Re:Tweets are not private papers

[ClioCJS]

They aren't getting the tweets - those are a matter of public record. They are getting the IP addresses and meta data around the tweets. If you published a book, I don't need to subpoena the contents of the book. This is more like inspecting your original papers forensically to see where you were when you wrote the book. This isn't information you would be able to get from a published copy. You'd have to get the original pieces of paper it was typed on (assume it's 1970 for this metaphor!) -- something not in public (like tweet IPaddress meta data) -- to do forensic analysis to find that out.

Re:"the same civil rights online as we have offlin

[Ihmhi]

"Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti", or "Committee for State Security". That's not all that far off from "Department of Homeland Security".