1.Does the Government have a legal ground to demand the information from Twitter?
Obviously it does not seem to have.
If it had it could/would have sued Twitter right away with out going about getting a secret order to issue subpoena.If it had filed a case right away and demanded the information in open court, it would have the information right away,provided the case had a leg to stand on.
Seems to me a frustrated attempt to do something for the political maters FBI seems to have resorted to this subterfuge.
Another issue is that how the Government can demand Third party information, which is illegal, for if the Government goes in this vein,it can demand anything about anybody from anybody.There goes the Freedom of the individual.
Fourth Amendment and Patriots Act provisions have never been focussed so sharply till date.
Would law makers decide which has to have overriding priority?
Let there be least contradictions.
Story:
THE news that federal prosecutors have demanded that the microblogging site Twitter provide the account details of people connected to the WikiLeaks case, including its founder, Julian Assange, isn’t noteworthy because the government’s request was unusual or intrusive. It is noteworthy because it became public.
Even as Web sites, social networking services and telephone companies amass more and more information about their users, the government — in the course of conducting inquiries — has been able to look through much of the information without the knowledge of the people being investigated.
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.
This kind of order is far more common than one may think, and in the case of terrorism and espionage investigations the government can issue them without a court order. The government says more than 50,000 of these requests, known as national security letters, are sent each year, but they come with gag orders that prevent those contacted from revealing what the agency has been seeking or even the existence of the gag orders.
“It’s a perfect example of how the government can use its broad powers to silence people,” said Nicholas Merrill, who was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the use of national security letters, authorized by the USA Patriot Act. Until August, he was forbidden to acknowledge the existence of a 2004 letter that the company he founded, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation, received from the F.B.I.
The government cites national security as the reason the contents of the letters — even their existence — are kept secret. The F.B.I. is trying to prevent plots as they are being hatched, according to Valerie Caproni, the general counsel of the agency, and thus needs stealth.
In the case of a small Internet service provider like Calyx, which was located in downtown Manhattan and had hundreds of customers, even mentioning that the F.B.I. had been sniffing around could harm an investigation, she said, especially if “the target is antsy anyway.”
……
Mr. Merrill argues that the blanket gag orders have prevented a full public debate on the subject. He himself largely left the I.S.P. business in 2004, independent of his legal case, and only now has returned to hosting a couple of clients as part of a nonprofit project, the Calyx Institute, which aims to study how to protect consumers’ privacy.
Regarding the news about Twitter, he wrote in an e-mail: “I commend Twitter’s policy of notifying their customers of government requests for their private data and for their challenging and subsequently removing the gag order. This is a great example of the government’s misuse of secrecy provisions and of exemplary privacy ethics on behalf of Twitter.”
Ms. Caproni, who has testified before Congress about the program, said that it had been more than amply debated. “People at the A.C.L.U. and the press” think the letters are “a bigger deal than the companies.”
To one of Mr. Merrill’s A.CL.U. lawyers, Jameel Jaffer, the smooth operation of the system is a sign that it is not working. The privacy rights at stake are not those of the companies who hold the information, Mr. Jaffer said, but “about people whose records are held.” And those people should be told, he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/business/media/10link.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
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