Twitter Raises Eyebrows on Secret WikiLeaks Subpoenas
After the U.S. government asked Twitter via court order to hand over private messages between WikiLeaks associates, public and media attention has begun to rise on the topic of ‘secret subpoenas’ involving Facebook, Google and others.
Questioning the silence of other internet giants, WikiLeaks tweeted, “Note that we can assume Google & Facebook also have secret US government subpoenas.” They make no comment. Did they fold?
The information requested from Twitter by the U.S government included IP addresses, e-mail addresses, credit card numbers, etc. Additionally, some sources even indicated that all 650,000 Twitter followers of WikiLeaks were also under increased scrutiny, which may just shed some light on the probability of those ‘secret subpoenas’. This is all in light of Facebook’s 2009 announcement it has received 10-20 of these every day, and Verizon’s 2007 indication of 90,000 per year.
In our previous coverage of WikiLeaks’ involvement with Facebook and Twitter, we discussed how the two social-networking giants terminated pro-WikiLeaks’ hackers’ accounts, and worked to avoid any personal association with Operation Payback. While removing hackers’ accounts doesn’t represent any sort of practical retaliation to their DDoS attacks, the less legal repercussions Facebook and Twitter have to face due to their noisy residents, the better.
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