Twitter Is Hero as Feds Attempt to Trample WikiLeaks' Free Speech

Today is a global day to defend freedom of speech, according to the call for action from Anonymous, an online protest group dedicated to internet freedom. The group feels threatened by government interference and the failure of corporate media to fulfill their vital role in checking the abuse of authority. The outcry is sparked by the intensified government crackdown on WikiLeaks. In an open letter to the Department of Justice, posted to its blog, Anonymous writes:

“We are regretful of your actions to attempt to retrieve information from Twitter about the account belonging to Wikileaks, as by doing so you are attempting to remove the anonymity of the poster and by extension, their right to speech.”

The letter was posted last week as it came to light that the Department of Justice had issued a secret subpoena on Twitter to obtain the accounts and private messages of former WikiLeaks volunteer and member of the Icelandic Parliament, Birgitta Jonsdottir, and Dutch hacker Rop Gongrijp in addition to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. The subpoena came with a gag order preventing Twitter from notifying the interrogated and was meet by hard criticism. The Icelandic interior minister Ogmundur Jonasson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV that:

"[It is] very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official....This is even more serious when put [in] perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people's freedom in general.”

And the subpoena is indeed very general. It targets not only the investigated individuals, but also requests all records and other information relating to Twitter accounts associated with WikiLeaks "including non-content information associated with the contents of any communication or file stored by or for the account(s).” This includes WikiLeaks followers on Twitter. A recent article on Bloomsberg News cites Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens as saying:

“The agency’s subpoena of Twitter is “grossly overbroad” and would give prosecutors access to data on a member of Iceland’s parliament and more than 634,000 people who follow WikiLeaks’ so-called tweets on the site.”

Sadly, the request for private information is not unique. According to the New York Times, the subpoena issued on Twitter is noteworthy, not because of its content, but because it has been unsealed. In fact more than 50,000 of these orders, known as national security letters, are sent every year, but they come with a seal of secrecy that prevents the company from revealing its existence to the investigated. By challenging the order legally, Twitter shines as a positive example of a private company that sticks to its ethical policies and stands up for the rights of its users.

It leaves one question lingering in the air: What happens to the remaining unsealed national security letters? Do the recipients simply succumb to government pressure and abide by the requests? WikiLeaks, suspecting the subpoena is a tactic in a larger effort by the Department of Justice to prosecute the organization, speculates that similar subpoenas have been filed to Facebook and Google. Both have refused to comment on the case.

One might ask what legitimizes the national security letters in the first place?

Interviewed by Bloomsberg News, Mark Stephens said that WikiLeaks is nothing but an organization that publishes leaked documents on its Web site and that the subpoena violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable government searches. FBI, however, holds that the subpoenas, issued on the basis of a clause in the U.S. Patriot Act, are necessary for "obtaining such records [that] will make the process of identifying computer criminals and tracing their internet communications faster and easier."