Twitter Puts Spotlight On Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas

nytimes.com:

For the Twitter request, the government obtained a secret subpoena from a federal court. Twitter challenged the secrecy, not the subpoena itself, and won the right to inform the people whose records the government was seeking. WikiLeaks says it suspects that other large sites like Google and Facebook have received similar requests and simply went along with the government.

Read the whole story: nytimes.com

Comments

[nitebat]

09:09 PM on 01/10/2011

Folks:

Yet another example of the 'blow back effect' of secrecy. The fallout from the DoJ Twitter subpoena disclosure far outweighs the value of the information they were after. Not only has Twitter informed it's clients of the pending subpoena, they used the judicial system to do it. The same judicial system that the DoJ is supposed to a guiding light for. Twitter then went above and beyond by letting the public know too. Not only do we know about this incident but we now know that this same thing must have happened many, many times in the past.

Note to American companies:

The American administration is not your friend. By complying with their demands without a fight, you permanently damage your reputation in the public's eye. Others are gathering to sweep up your lost client base by offering them the personal protection that you can no longer give.

Many of these new companies will probably have web site addresses that end in '.is'. Oh, if you're thinking of moving there yourselves, change your business policies first and not just your name.

'Secrecy isn't dead, just the bad ones are...' - nb

[J0E1]

10:22 AM on 01/10/2011

Good for twitter and shame on Google and Facebook if it's true that they just went along with the secret subpoenas without even a small challenge.

[jo smith456]

09:58 AM on 01/10/2011

For a social-networking (where OPINIONS or POINTS of VIEW ARE DISCUSSED or EXPRESSED) platform or mechanism, it's a GOOD thing that Twitter is doing the first step to make PUBLIC that a govt (e.g. US) is requesting/getting account information about Twitter's members. (Authoritarian, non-democratic governments do this kind of thing...)