US orders Twitter to hand over Wikileaks supporters’ tweets

Posted by Bradley Wint on 08/01/2011

The US government has ordered Twitter to hand over all information with regards to the accounts of a few well-known Wikileaks supporters and workers.

Some of the requested data includes details such as tweets, direct messages, IP information, email addresses and more. The government pretty much wants every bit of info associated with the accounts. The targets include Birgitta Jonsdottir, Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gongrijp, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and the main Wikileaks account.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP, has been fighting back the requests and is trying to get the help of her government to stop the US from obtaining her info, which stretched back to November 2009. Jonsdottir used to work at Wikileaks before she became a Member of Parliament with the Icelandic government. She was partly responsible for producing a video of a US Apache helicopter shooting down innocent cilivians in Iraq back in 2007. The video was then released in April 2010.

The various Tweeters have since told the public to stop sending Tweets, and also mention not being afraid of any implications because they have nothing to hide.

The subpoena was made available later on by Salon.

So will the government stop at Twitter, or will they go further to pull information from Facebook and email accounts? Who knows.