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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.