Federal court officials have ordered Twitter to give them all details concerning any accounts linked to some of the supporters of WikiLeaks as part of the governmental investigation into the whistle-blower site.
The U.S. Department of Justice took out a subpoena for the site on Dec. 14 and asked for all records that pertained to the ongoing criminal investigations clear back to Nov. 1, 2009. Some of the persons names are WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst who is thought to have given documents to WikiLeaks.
Computer programmer Jacob Appelbaum is also named in the order, and is identified by his Twitter username, ioerror, along with former WikiLeaks volunteer and the current Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir has also already tweeted that she plans to oppose the subpoena.
According to a copy of the subpoena published by Salon.com, the federal courts system is trying to get data on things like session times and mailing addresses.
WikiLeaks has already put out a statement condemning what it calls “harassment by the U.S. government” via their attorney Mark Stephens.
WikiLeaks problems started when the whistle blowing site began to publish thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables back in November 2010. The release started weeks of arguments and caused those that supported WikiLeaks, as well as those that opposed it, to fight with each other using denial of service cyber attacks, which also caused companies like PayPal to cut off its associations with the WikiLeaks site.
Assange was then arrested in December in the UK and accused of sexual assault on charges that had been at first dropped by authorities in Sweden, but then were reinstated, however, he is currently out on bail.
WikiLeaks reported in its statement that a few of those named in the subpoena are key figures who helped the site to make public a U.S. military video that showed a 2007 airstrike in which Iraqi civilians were killed. WikiLeaks has told its attorneys to oppose the subpoena, and is asking both Facebook and Google to disclose if they have also gotten any similar subpoenas.
The order was unsealed by a federal judge Jan. 5 after Twitter asked for the right to tell the people who were being targeted.
Besides getting a subpoena, it was also let out that the U.S. government it taking steps to protect any people judged by officials to be in danger due to the leak of the documents WikiLeaks released.
U.S. State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley told reporters on Jan. 7 that the department had assisted in the relocation of a few people who had been identified in the diplomatic documents due to concerns of whether or not they would remain safe.
WikiLeaks has said they didn’t put anyone in any danger.
