

Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information - jmj42
http://mashable.com/2012/01/06/twitter-ordered-to-hand-over-wikileaks-supporters-account-information/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

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stellar678
I wonder if these types of legally-enforced privacy intrusions will bring
about a new design goal for web-app builders: making retrieval of this
information impossible for the service provider.

It's one thing for Twitter to promise not to give your information to
government entities until asked, but it's a whole other thing to engineer
their application so it's impossible to comply with such a request.

~~~
josnyder
It already has, to a small extent. Two services I can think of which already
aim to provide this guarantee: Firefox Sync [1] and Tarsnap [2].

[1]
[http://docs.services.mozilla.com/sync/overview.html#cryptogr...](http://docs.services.mozilla.com/sync/overview.html#cryptography)

[2] <http://www.tarsnap.com/crypto.html>

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linuxhansl
I still do not understand on what grounds this is legally possible. Wikileaks
was not convicted or even accused of any crime.

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mpyne
Have any Wikileaks supporters been accused of any crimes?

In the meatspace, if a suspected or known criminal was always hanging out in a
certain small corporate office with only a few people then they might wiretap
the whole building, even though the other workers are not necessarily
involved.

From there they might be able to subpeona the personnel records for that small
group of employees even though neither the corporation nor the
"extracurricular" group those workers are involved with are even charged with
any wrongdoing, based just on the personal wrongdoing of one of those workers
and that one's association with the others in his building.

That doesn't mean there's no shenanigans going on here (I haven't looked at
the article yet) but Wikileaks being formally accused of a crime is not
compulsory to getting individual subpeonas in general.

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RobH
The language used in this story is awful. If I had never heard of the group
Wikileaks, I would assume they were a known criminal organisation. "having
ties to..." "allegedly support the group..." replace Wikileaks with Al-
Qaeda/Mafia/IRA and you get an everyday story about a bad group of people not
a non-profit org who assist whistle-blowers. Fascinating how such everyday
phrases can colour your perception, to such a degree.

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prophetjohn
What happens if Twitter refuses? It's probably going to take a tech giant like
this, Google, etc. to stand up to the United States government. I just can't
see Twitter getting their domains seized or their servers confiscated or
anything extreme like that. It would be a huge story and I can't imagine that
drawing attention to something so unconstitutional (IANAL, but it's gotta be,
right?) is what the government wants.

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JoshTriplett
Twitter won't refuse, and if they did, their servers _would_ get seized and
the information _would_ get taken from those servers by force. As much as it
might sometimes work to our advantage, processes like this do not typically
consider how things look in the press. If they did, we wouldn't see as many
horrific stories like this in the press as we currently do.

~~~
nextparadigms
Couldn't Twitter do it anyway, allow them to take the info by force, let them
reinstate their servers, and then sue the Government for damages?

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JoshTriplett
> Couldn't Twitter do it anyway, allow them to take the info by force, let
> them reinstate their servers, and then sue the Government for damages?

Good luck with that. The government would simply argue that Twitter could
easily have avoided the damages by cooperating ("you brought this on
yourself").

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sgentle
In this case, I can't imagine the Twitter details include much more than email
and ip addresses. What I'd be worried about is what happens afterwards, when
they order Google and Microsoft to hand over your emails and chat logs.

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nextparadigms
Call me crazy, but I don't think the US Government should have access to such
private information of foreign citizens, even if it's hosted in US. At the
very least, it should be their own national Governments that should be able to
request for it, and only if their own laws allow it.

This will only promote anti-Americanism, as people will try to stay away from
American services. Who knows how far they will they take this. If I "support"
#OccupyWallStreet on Twitter, does that mean that one day they might come
after me, too? I really can't be sure either way these days, which means I
can't treat things like these too lightly.

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jmj42
The story is actually about the european courts granting the U.S. authority to
request information on their citizen. While I don't expect the U.S. courts
will put up much of a roadblock (they rarely do), The DoJ will still have to
go through the U.S. process to get the desired information.

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leeoniya
come on, Appelbaum knows better than to ever have exchanged anything of value
over an unencrypted medium not under his control. i woul dbe very suprised if
they produced anything useful from twitter's records.

if they are able to see get his bank account or CC info, and then subpoena
further records from his banks (which would be very f'd up indeed), then they
may get something more. but that may be a steep mountain to climb under no
hard evidence present.

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dshep
Wait, twitter has billing info on its users?

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zotz
<http://dot-bit.org>

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runn1ng
More reason to use Tor and .onion domains!

Oh wait. The only thing in onionspace right now are child porn sites and drug
dealers. Nevermind.

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burgerbrain
People _have_ been using tor service webservers to release material as
Anonymous.

~~~
runn1ng
Yes, it can be used for regular political activism, and sometimes is.

But the "four horsemen of infocalypse" are all there, ridiculously easy to
find, but at the same time impossible to trace, and form a biggest part of
onionspace.

It can be also taken as a proof of true Tor anonymity, though; the sites are
all there, and the only thing law enforcement can do is to try to break the
security of the sites and sneak for some info THERE.

