Legal Research

US Subpoenas Twitter Records Re Wikileaks

By Simon Fodden

Glen Greenwald on Salon has a thrice-updated story on the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to obtain from Twitter as much information as possible about a number of people associated with Wikileaks. On December 14, 2010 a U.S. Magistrate Judge made a sealed order requiring Twitter to divulge:

A. The following customer or subscriber account infomation for each account registered to or associated with Wikilcaks; rop_g; ioerror; birgittaj; Julian Assange; Bradley Manning; Rop Gongrijp; Birgitta Jonsdottir for the time period November l, 2009 to present:
1. subscriber names, user names, screen names, or other identities;
2. mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses, and other contact information;
3. connection records, or records of session times and durations;
4. length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;
5. telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and
6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.

B. All records and other information relating to the account(s) and time period in Part A, including:
1. records of user activity for any connections made to or from the Account, including the date, time, length, and method of connections, data transfer volume, user name, and source and destination Internet Protocol address(es);
2. non-content information associated with the contents of any communication or file stored by or for the acount(s), such as the source and destination email addresses and IP addresses.
3. correspondence and notes of records related to the account(s).

[Salon has made PDF of the order available online.]

Evidently, this order has only now come to light.

One of the named persons, Birgitta Jonsdottir, is now an Icelandic MP. She has publicly expressed her dissatisfaction with this effort by the United States government.

The parties whose accounts were the object of the order learned of it because later last week the same judge, at Twitter’s request, unsealed the order. That second order has also been made available by Salon.

The provision under which the order was sought and made is U.S. Code: Title 18, § 2703 (d) (Required disclosure of customer communications or records).

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 09, 2011 (boomark / email).