A US judge on Friday ordered Twitter to hand over data of three users in contact with the controversial website WikiLeaks, rejecting arguments the move violated freedom of speech and privacy. President Barack Obama's administration obtained a court order last year seeking information from the Twitter accounts as it considers action against WikiLeaks, which has released a flood of secret diplomatic documents.
One of the accounts belongs to an Icelandic lawmaker, Birgitta Jonsdottir. Iceland's foreign ministry in January summoned the US ambassador to express "serious concern" about the Twitter order. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan, based in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the argument made by the three Twitter users' that the order would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech.
"The Twitter order does not seek to control or direct the content of petitioners' speech or association," she wrote. She said the three "already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available" and voluntarily provided information to Twitter pursuant to the website's privacy policy.
Buchanan also dismissed the argument that the order violated the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects people against "unreasonable" searches. When the trio relayed information to Twitter, they gave up "any reasonable expectation of privacy," she said.
WikiLeaks, which has strongly criticised the order, said that three Twitter users never worked for the site but that two helped make public a video that showed a 2007 US helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed several people. The footage appeared to show the Apache pilots mistaking a camera carried by an employee of the Reuters news agency as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
WikiLeaks has since angered US authorities by posting secret documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and releasing a slew of internal correspondence among US diplomats around the world. Aden Fine of the American Civil Liberties Union, the rights advocacy group which defended the Twitter users, said they planned to appeal. "This is not the last word," Fine said.
"This decision gives the government the ability to obtain private information about Internet communication in secret, except in extraordinary circumstances," he said. "That's not how our judicial system works and it shouldn't have been permitted here," he said.
Fine said the Twitter users planned to take the case to a district judge. Buchanan is a magistrate, a type of legal officer who generally helps courts prepare for trials. Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which also backed the legal challenge, said that in an era in which third parties hold so much digital information, "the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself."
Besides Jonsdottir, the Twitter accounts belong to US computer researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch volunteer for WikiLeaks. Buchanan rejected calls to drop the order in light of Jonsdottir's position as a foreign lawmaker. The order "does not seek information on parliamentary affairs in Iceland, or any of Ms Jonsdottir's parliamentary acts. Her status as a member of parliament is merely incidental to this investigation," she wrote.
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