US Government defends Wikileaks probe of Twitter
Declan McCullagh reports of the U.S. Justice Department on Friday dismissing as “absurd” any privacy and free speech concerns about its request for access to the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks volunteers.
Last Friday’s brief follows an appeal that attorneys representing the WikiLeaks volunteers filed Mar. 25. A hearing has been set for later this month in Arlington, Va., before U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady.
The attorneys’ appeal to O’Grady seeks to throw out a magistrate judge’s ruling on Mar. 11 that granted prosecutors access to the accounts, including information about what Internet and e-mail addresses are associated with them. The government sought the court order as part of a grand jury probe that appears to be investigating whether WikiLeaks principals, including editor Julian Assange, violated American criminal laws.
The Justice Department’s brief, which asks O’Grady to “direct Twitter to fully and promptly comply,” also raises a series of other arguments including: criminal procedures instead of civil should apply; the order complied with the Stored Communications Act; and that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply.
In their own brief last month, attorneys for the Twitter account holders said prosecutors’ request violates federal law, “intrudes upon” their clients’ First Amendment right to freedom of association, and “threatens” their right to privacy.
Damn straight it does. The DOJ is seeking the logs and other information about the account, not any actual messages between the parties involved or the matter of their content. Twitter, at best, is a weak connection between the suspects, and should not be used to substantiate conjectures made by the DOJ. A lot of people retweeted, replied to, and were messaged by Assange in his time on Twitter. Just because a few of those people had pasts that the Justice Department think relevant doesn’t mean their private information can be leveraged from Twitter. This case is important for determining the future of social networking sites like Twitter regarding privacy and freedom of association. If the DOJ continues to insist on having access to private information released to companies like Google and Facebook, all of us become susceptible all kinds of potential abuse.
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