ALISTAIR FAIRWEATHER
Mail & Guardian
January 12, 2011
It’s like a plot out of a spy novel or the lost Stieg Larsson book: a powerful government issues a secret subpoena to an internet service for access to private information, so that it can pursue a case against foreign nationals for leaking embarrassing information. Sadly this is stranger than fiction.
On the January 8 it emerged that the United States government had ordered Twitter, via a type of secret subpoena known as a “national security letter”, to grant it access to all the private communications between five Twitter users: Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Jacob Appelbaum, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Rop Gonggrijp. The first two names are familiar to anyone following the WikiLeaks case, but what’s really extraordinary is that the last two aren’t even US citizens.
What’s even more scary is that Twitter’s lawyers had to go to court just to win the privilege to tell their users they were being ordered to give away their information. This has raised speculations that other web companies, such as Google and Facebook, may also have been served with such national security letters and just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go to court to break the federally imposed silence.
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