Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Breaking: Twitter motions unsealed in gov’t Wikileaks investigation
by Larry Geller
Do you follow WikiLeaks? Who knows, your IP address and other personal information might be swept up by this secret government investigation. SOME of the people they are after are known, but there are still the unknowns as Big Brother continues to trample the Bill of Rights.
A federal court in Alexandria, Virginia today unsealed motions filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and others concerning government attempts to obtain Twitter account records about three individuals in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. The documents were originally filed under seal late last month.
One of the newly-available motions is a request to unseal the still-secret court records of the government's attempts to collect private records from Twitter, Inc., as well as other companies who may have received demands for information from the government. The second motion seeks to overturn the December 14 court order requiring Twitter to provide information about its users.
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"Twitter is a publication and communication service, so the information sought by the government relates to what these individuals said and where they were when they said it," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "This raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns. It is especially troubling since the request seeks information about all statements made by these people, regardless of whether their speech relates to WikiLeaks."[Electronic Frontier Foundation, Legal Battle Over Government Demands for Twitter Records Unsealed by Court, 2/8/2011]
The snip is from the EFF press release just out.
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