Twitter subpoena
Encyclopedia
On 14 December 2010, the United States Department of Justice
issued a subpoena
accompanied by a national security letter
to Twitter
in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks
. While only five people were individually named, according to lawyer Mark Stephens
the order effectively entailed the collection in relation to criminal prosecution of the personal identifying information of over six hundred thousand Twitter users, namely those who were "followers" of WikiLeaks. Twitter appealed against the accompanying gag order
in order to be able to disclose its existence to its users, and was ultimately successful in its appeal. Subsequent reactions included the discussion of secret subpoenas in the U.S., criticism of the particular subpoena issued, an immediate, temporary 0.5 percent reduction in the number of Twitter followers of WikiLeaks, and calls for the recognition and emulation of Twitter's stance.
was elected as governor of Pennsylvania
, it was revealed that he had issued a subpoena against Twitter to demand personal information on two users who criticised him. The Philadelphia Inquirer
claimed that the subpoena was issued because of the two users' criticisms of Corbett. Corbett's spokesperson said that the subpoena was issued as "part of an ongoing criminal investigation". The two users were helped by Public Citizen
and the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) in opposing the subpoena. The subpoena was "dropped" by the Attorney-General's office. On 11 March, a U.S. judge upheld the request of the federal prosecutor.
directing Twitter to hand over information in accordance with 18 USC § 2703(d). The order additionally directed that Twitter should not disclose the existence of the subpoena without prior authorization. Issued in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks, named were Julian Assange
, Bradley Manning, Rop Gonggrijp
, Jacob Appelbaum
and Birgitta Jonsdottir
. The requisite information included their user names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank account details, and credit card numbers.
Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens
argued that since the application also extended to destination email addresses and IP addresses for any communication stored for the named accounts, personal identifying information was to be collected for some six hundred and thirty-four thousand followers of WikiLeaks's Twitter feed.
WikiLeaks alleged it had evidence suggesting similar subpoenas had been issued to Google
and Facebook
, and lawyer Mark Stephens
said that similar information had been sought not only from Google and Facebook but also from EBay
's Skype
unit. WikiLeaks called for Google and Facebook to unseal the subpoenas if they had received them, but no spokespeople were available to comment.
Aden Fine of the ACLU said that "Twitter's e-mail indicated that it had not yet turned over to the U.S. government any records that prosecutors requested."
observed that the US government issues over fifty thousand such requests for information each year, typically accompanied by the so-called gag order, linking the case to how "1986 Privacy Law is Outrun by the Web". Nicholas Merrill
, the first to file a constitutional challenge against the use of national security letters, describes this as "a perfect example of how the government can use its broad powers to silence people". Lawmakers in Iceland criticised the subpoena as an instance of overreach. Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens
, interpreted the subpoena as a sign that US authorities were desperate to develop a criminal case against Assange. He stated that the subpoena was an attempt to "shake the electronic tree in the hope some kind of criminal charge drops out the bottom of it."
Juan Cole
, a historian of the modern Middle East
and South Asia
, described the subpoena as "a fishing expedition and legally fishy in that regard" that "is being pursued by the Obama administration out of terror that further massive leaks will be made public." He contrasted the legal action against people associated with WikiLeaks with the lack of legal actions against "Bush administration officials, such as Dick Cheney, who ordered people tortured [and] have not been in any way inconvenienced by Mssrs. Obama and Holder." Cole suggested that users of social media
should shift from Facebook
and Twitter
that have "internet monopolies" and "are in turn tools of US government control" to social media based in Europe
or the Global South.
WikiLeaks's list of 637,000 followers on Twitter dropped by 3,000 in the hours following the announcement of the US Department of Justice action and grew to 650,000 .
Professor of Law Ben Saul
argued that the US had been compelled to attempt to obtain information on citizens of other countries through action against its own companies due to its lack of overseas law enforcement powers, suggesting that "the real question is how will other countries react ... will other governments try to do things to shut down this kind of investigation?" Members of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, Romania and the UK have questioned whether US 'snooping' on the Twitter accounts of those linked with WikiLeaks is in violation of European privacy laws.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
has since, comparing their law enforcement policies, stressed "how important it is that social media
companies do what they can to protect the sensitive data they hold from the prying eyes of the government". Wired
staff writer Ryan Singel said that Twitter's "action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow" and summarised his point of view by saying "Twitter beta-tested a spine" and that Twitter's response should become an "industry standard".
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
issued a subpoena
Subpoena
A subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
accompanied by a national security letter
National Security Letter
A National Security Letter is a form of administrative subpoena used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and reportedly by other U.S. Government Agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight...
to Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks
Wikileaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...
. While only five people were individually named, according to lawyer Mark Stephens
Mark Stephens (solicitor)
Mark Howard Stephens CBE is a British solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property rights and human rights with the firm Finers Stephens Innocent...
the order effectively entailed the collection in relation to criminal prosecution of the personal identifying information of over six hundred thousand Twitter users, namely those who were "followers" of WikiLeaks. Twitter appealed against the accompanying gag order
Gag order
A gag order is an order, sometimes a legal order by a court or government, other times a private order by an employer or other institution, restricting information or comment from being made public.Gag orders are often used against participants involved in a lawsuit or criminal trial...
in order to be able to disclose its existence to its users, and was ultimately successful in its appeal. Subsequent reactions included the discussion of secret subpoenas in the U.S., criticism of the particular subpoena issued, an immediate, temporary 0.5 percent reduction in the number of Twitter followers of WikiLeaks, and calls for the recognition and emulation of Twitter's stance.
Chronology
Prior to the December 2010 subpoena relating to WikiLeaks, Twitter had received at least one subpoena for information about its users. Just after the Attorney-General of the US state of Pennsylvania Tom CorbettTom Corbett
Thomas W. Corbett is the 46th and current Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States. He is a former Attorney General of Pennsylvania and was elected to that office in 2004 and reelected in 2008...
was elected as governor of Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, 2010
The Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 2010 was held on November 2, 2010. The winning candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor will serve a four-year term from 2011 to 2015. Candidates for Lieutenant Governor were nominated in a separate primary contest; however, the Lieutenant Governor,...
, it was revealed that he had issued a subpoena against Twitter to demand personal information on two users who criticised him. The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Philadelphia Inquirer is a morning daily newspaper that serves the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area of the United States. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the...
claimed that the subpoena was issued because of the two users' criticisms of Corbett. Corbett's spokesperson said that the subpoena was issued as "part of an ongoing criminal investigation". The two users were helped by Public Citizen
Public Citizen
Public Citizen is a non-profit, consumer rights advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., United States, with a branch in Austin, Texas. Public Citizen was founded by Ralph Nader in 1971, headed for 26 years by Joan Claybrook, and is now headed by Robert Weissman.-Lobbying Efforts:Public Citizen...
and the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
(ACLU) in opposing the subpoena. The subpoena was "dropped" by the Attorney-General's office. On 11 March, a U.S. judge upheld the request of the federal prosecutor.
Subpoena issued with accompanying gag order
On 14 December 2010 the U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoenaSubpoena
A subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
directing Twitter to hand over information in accordance with 18 USC § 2703(d). The order additionally directed that Twitter should not disclose the existence of the subpoena without prior authorization. Issued in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks, named were Julian Assange
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, writer, computer programmer and Internet activist. He is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks with the stated purpose of creating open governments.WikiLeaks has published material...
, Bradley Manning, Rop Gonggrijp
Rop Gonggrijp
Robbert Valentijn Gonggrijp is a Dutch hacker and one of the founders of XS4ALL.- Biography :While growing up in Wormer in the Dutch Zaanstreek area, he became known as a teenage hacker and appeared as one of the main characters in Jan Jacobs's book "Kraken en Computers" which...
, Jacob Appelbaum
Jacob Appelbaum
Jacob Appelbaum is an independent computer security researcher and hacker. He is currently employed by the University of Washington, and is a core member of the Tor project. Appelbaum is known for representing Wikileaks at the 2010 Hope conference...
and Birgitta Jonsdottir
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a member of parliament of Althing, the Icelandic parliament, formerly representing the Citizens' Movement, but now representing The Movement. Her district is the Reykjavík South Constituency. She was elected to the Icelandic parliament in April 2009 on behalf of a movement...
. The requisite information included their user names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank account details, and credit card numbers.
Assange's lawyer Mark Stephens
Mark Stephens (solicitor)
Mark Howard Stephens CBE is a British solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property rights and human rights with the firm Finers Stephens Innocent...
argued that since the application also extended to destination email addresses and IP addresses for any communication stored for the named accounts, personal identifying information was to be collected for some six hundred and thirty-four thousand followers of WikiLeaks's Twitter feed.
WikiLeaks alleged it had evidence suggesting similar subpoenas had been issued to Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, and lawyer Mark Stephens
Mark Stephens (solicitor)
Mark Howard Stephens CBE is a British solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property rights and human rights with the firm Finers Stephens Innocent...
said that similar information had been sought not only from Google and Facebook but also from EBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
's Skype
Skype
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...
unit. WikiLeaks called for Google and Facebook to unseal the subpoenas if they had received them, but no spokespeople were available to comment.
Appeal and publication of the subpoena
Twitter applied to notify its users of the issue of the subpoena. On 5 January 2011 it was notified of success in its appeal, allowing the company to inform its users and to give them ten days in turn in which to appeal. After Twitter informed Jonsdottir, she released a message via the micro-blogging site that the "USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?"Aden Fine of the ACLU said that "Twitter's e-mail indicated that it had not yet turned over to the U.S. government any records that prosecutors requested."
Users' opposition to the subpoena
Among those specifically named by the subpoena, Assange, Jonsdottir, Appelbaum and Gonggrijp all stated that they would oppose it. Lawyer Aden Fine of the ACLU participated in defending those subpoenaed. Jonsdottir stated that she had contacted the Icelandic Minister of Justice and Human Rights and commented that the "U.S. government is trying to criminalize whistleblowing and publication of whistleblowing material."Subsequent reactions
The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
observed that the US government issues over fifty thousand such requests for information each year, typically accompanied by the so-called gag order, linking the case to how "1986 Privacy Law is Outrun by the Web". Nicholas Merrill
Nicholas Merrill
Nicholas Merrill is the founder of Calyx Internet Access and the Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act. After receiving a National Security Letter from the FBI, he sued the FBI and Department...
, the first to file a constitutional challenge against the use of national security letters, describes this as "a perfect example of how the government can use its broad powers to silence people". Lawmakers in Iceland criticised the subpoena as an instance of overreach. Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens
Mark Stephens (solicitor)
Mark Howard Stephens CBE is a British solicitor specialising in media law, intellectual property rights and human rights with the firm Finers Stephens Innocent...
, interpreted the subpoena as a sign that US authorities were desperate to develop a criminal case against Assange. He stated that the subpoena was an attempt to "shake the electronic tree in the hope some kind of criminal charge drops out the bottom of it."
Juan Cole
Juan Cole
John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on...
, a historian of the modern Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
and South Asia
South Asia
South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...
, described the subpoena as "a fishing expedition and legally fishy in that regard" that "is being pursued by the Obama administration out of terror that further massive leaks will be made public." He contrasted the legal action against people associated with WikiLeaks with the lack of legal actions against "Bush administration officials, such as Dick Cheney, who ordered people tortured [and] have not been in any way inconvenienced by Mssrs. Obama and Holder." Cole suggested that users of social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
should shift from Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
that have "internet monopolies" and "are in turn tools of US government control" to social media based in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
or the Global South.
WikiLeaks's list of 637,000 followers on Twitter dropped by 3,000 in the hours following the announcement of the US Department of Justice action and grew to 650,000 .
Professor of Law Ben Saul
Ben Saul
Ben Saul is associate professor of the University of Sydney and Co-Director of the Sydney Centre for International Law. His research interests include international law, in particular, international aspects of anti-terrorism law, humanitarian law, human rights law, among others.Ben Saul publishes...
argued that the US had been compelled to attempt to obtain information on citizens of other countries through action against its own companies due to its lack of overseas law enforcement powers, suggesting that "the real question is how will other countries react ... will other governments try to do things to shut down this kind of investigation?" Members of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, Romania and the UK have questioned whether US 'snooping' on the Twitter accounts of those linked with WikiLeaks is in violation of European privacy laws.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
has since, comparing their law enforcement policies, stressed "how important it is that social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
companies do what they can to protect the sensitive data they hold from the prying eyes of the government". Wired
Wired News
Wired News is an online technology news website, formerly known as HotWired, that split off from Wired magazine when the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast Publishing in the 1990s. Wired News was owned by Lycos not long after the split, until Condé Nast purchased Wired News on July 11, 2006...
staff writer Ryan Singel said that Twitter's "action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow" and summarised his point of view by saying "Twitter beta-tested a spine" and that Twitter's response should become an "industry standard".
See also
- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - US Act of 1978, preventing spying on US citizens without a court order
- Electronic Communications Privacy ActElectronic Communications Privacy ActThe Electronic Communications Privacy Act is a United States law.- Overview :The “electronic communication” means any transfer of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any nature transmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic, photoelectronic or...
- US Act of 1986, before widespread email and cellphone usage - PATRIOT Act - US Act of 2001, introducing counter-terrorism measures
- American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (2004)American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (2004)American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit filed on behalf of a formerly unknown ISP owner by the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. federal government....
- first constitutional challenge of US PATRIOT Act national security letterNational Security LetterA National Security Letter is a form of administrative subpoena used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and reportedly by other U.S. Government Agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight...
provisions - Information sensitivityInformation sensitivityInformation sensitivity is the control of access to information or knowledge that might result in loss of an advantage or level of security if disclosed to others who might have low or unknown trustability or undesirable intentions....