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Why Twitter Was the Only Company to Challenge the Secret WikiLeaks Subpoena
Secret subpoenas of the kind the Department of Justice sent Twitter are apparently not unusual. In fact, other tech companies may also have received similar WikiLeaks-related requests. But what is unusual in this story is that Twitter resisted. Which raises an interesting question: Assuming that Twitter was not the only company to have been served a secret subpoena, why was it the only company that fought back? The answer might lie in the figure leading Twitter’s legal efforts, Alexander Macgillivray (right), an incredibly mild mannered (really) but sharp-as-a-tack cyber law expert.
Twitter’s general counsel comes out of Harvard’s prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the cyber law powerhouse that has churned out some of the leading Internet legal thinkers. The center was founded a little over a decade ago by none other than Charles Nesson, the famous defender of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. While at Harvard, Macgillivray helped teach a course on the law of cyberspace, along with Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Today Seltzer leads the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, a collaboration between several law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks legal challenges to lawful online activity.
After Harvard, Macgillivray worked as a litigator for Silicon Valley super-firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati before moving to Google, where he first spearheaded legal issues for products like Search and Gmail. He soon found himself enmeshed in the fractious Google Books lawsuit. Observers credit Macgillivray’s agile mind and creative thinking with architecting with the Google Books Settlement--a solution that both enabled Google to lawfully scan the contents of university libraries and to create a mechanism for authors and publishers to get their out-of-print books back into circulation.
WikiLeaks activists may seek to quash demand for docs
Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch Internet activist who worked with WikiLeaks last year, said he and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's Parliament, want to quash a December 14 U.S. court order requiring Twitter to turn over their account records to U.S. prosecutors.
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Aden Fine, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union which is looking into the court order, said Twitter's e-mail indicated that it had not yet turned over to the U.S. government any records that prosecutors requested.
Mark Stephens, a British lawyer for Assange, told Reuters he did not believe either Assange or WikiLeaks had been notified by Twitter that U.S. authorities were seeking their records.
Over the weekend, Jonsdottir wrote on Twitter that she was seeking legal advice and had spoken to Iceland's minister of justice, who was looking into the case.
And in Twitter messages on Monday, she said: "The U.S. government is trying to criminalize whistleblowing and publication of whistleblowing material." Jonsdottir could not immediately be reached for comment.
What U.S. "justice" signifies around the world
Paragraphs 92-99 of the outline detail Sweden's history of violating the Convention Against Torture by rendering War on Terror suspects to Egypt to be tortured, and concludes: "based on its record as condemned by the United Nations Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee, Sweden would bow to US pressure and/or rely naively on diplomatic assurances from the USA that Mr. Assange would not be mistreated, with the consequence that he would be deported/expelled to the USA, where he would suffer serious ill-treatment." This danger is legally relevant because the governing Extradition Act bars the expulsion of a prisoner where "extradition would be [in]compatible with the Convention rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998." The outline also cited vigilante calls from leading right-wing figures for Assange's murder (yesterday, it was discovered that a prominent right-wing blogger, Melissa Clouthier, had registered the website JulianAssangeMustDie.com).
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And now we have the spectacle of Julian Assange's lawyers citing the Obama administration's policies of rendition and indefinite detention at Guantanamo as a reason why human rights treaties bar his extradition to any country (such as Sweden) which might transfer him to American custody. Indeed, almost every person I've spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others: the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror "justice system." Americans still like to think of themselves as "leaders of the free world," but in the eyes of many, it's exactly the "free world" to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.
2011-01-11 Press Release from Wikileaks
WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE
10 Jan 2011, 10:15 PM EST
"WikiLeaks: treat incitement seriously or expect more Gabrielle Giffords killing sprees."
Wikileaks today offered sympathy and condolences to the victims of the Tucson shooting together with best wishes for the recovery of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Giffords, a democrat from Arizona's 8th district, was the target of a shooting spree at a Jan 8 political event in which six others were killed.
Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, leading the investigation into the Giffords shooting, said that "vitriolic rhetoric" intended to "inflame the public on a daily basis ... has [an] impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with." Dupnik also observed that officials and media personalities engaging in violent rhetoric "have to consider that they have some responsibility when incidents like this occur and may occur in the future."
WikiLeaks staff and contributors have also been the target of unprecedented violent rhetoric by US prominent media personalities, including Sarah Palin, who urged the US administration to "Hunt down the WikiLeaks chief like the Taliban". Prominent US politician Mike Huckabee called for the execution of WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange on his Fox News program last November, and Fox News commentator Bob Beckel, referring to Assange, publicly called for people to "illegally shoot the son of a bitch." US radio personality Rush Limbaugh has called for pressure to "Give [Fox News President Roger] Ailes the order and [then] there is no Assange, I'll guarantee you, and there will be no fingerprints on it.", while the Washington Times columnist Jeffery T. Kuhner titled his column "Assassinate Assange" captioned with a picture Julian Assange overlayed with a gun site, blood spatters, and "WANTED DEAD or ALIVE" with the alive crossed out.
John Hawkins of Townhall.com has stated "If Julian Assange is shot in the head tomorrow or if his car is blown up when he turns the key, what message do you think that would send about releasing sensitive American data?"
Christian Whiton in a Fox News opinion piece called for violence against WikiLeaks publishers and editors, saying the US should "designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them."
WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said: "No organisation anywhere in the world is a more devoted advocate of free speech than Wikileaks but when senior politicians and attention seeking media commentators call for specific individuals or groups of people to be killed they should be charged with incitement -- to murder. Those who call for an act of murder deserve as significant share of the guilt as those raising a gun to pull the trigger."
"WikiLeaks has many young staff, volunteers and supporters in the same geographic vicinity as these the broadcast or circulation of these incitements to kill. We have also seen mentally unstable people travel from the US and other counties to other locations. Consequently we have to engage in extreme security measures."
"We call on US authorities and others to protect the rule of law by aggressively prosecuting these and similar incitements to kill. A civil nation of laws can not have prominent members of society constantly calling for the murder and assassination of other individuals or groups."
Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard
ANALYSIS: Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with its own version of it
Twitter beta-tested a spine.
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That’s what makes Twitter’s move so important. It briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves. The company’s action in asking for the gag order to be overturned sets a new precedent that we can only hope that other companies begin to follow.
The decision would be laudable in almost any situation, and may even be unprecendented by a massive tech firm. The only other gag orders I can think of that were challenged in court were those served on the Internet Archive, on a small library and on Nicholas Merrill, the president of the small New York City ISP Calyx Internet Access, who spent years resisting a National Security Letter order seeking information about one of his clients.
Even more remarkable, Twitter’s move comes as a litany of companies, including PayPal, Mastercard, VISA and Bank of America, follow the political winds away from the First Amendment, banning donations to WikiLeaks. And Amazon.com voluntarily threw the site off its hosting platform, even though there’s nothing illegal in publishing classified documents.
By standing up for its users, Twitter showed guts and principles. Much of it is likely attributable to Twitter’s general counsel Alexander Macgillivray. As security and privacy blogger Christopher Soghoian notes, Macgillivray was one of the first law students at Harvards’ Berkman internet law center and at in his previous job at Google "played a major role in getting the company to contribute takedown requests to chillingeffects.org."
Greg Mitchell shows how shamful and disgusting the Guardian has been
6:15 FInally. In one of the most shameful journalistic episodes in recent days of WikiLeaks action, The Guardian published a piece by James Richardson that charged WL with "collateral murder" in Zimbadwe and earning "the ignominy of Robert Mugabe's gratitude." Even though many bloggers, including yours truly, quickly pointed out that, in fact, it was The Guardian itself that first published the fateful cable, the paper did nothing to revise or amend or correct the article -- for eight days. Finally, today, it happened with a rewritten photo caption, a slight edit, and this at the end of the piece: "This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact."
oops
7:00 Several Twitter friends have pointed out re: the below that the origianal subhed remains unchanged on The Guardian piece with WikiLeaks still the sole recipient of Mugabe's "gratitude," not mentioning The Guardian.
Also, the piece appears at the Comment Is Free part of The Guardian site, Richardson is not Guardian columnist or op-ed writer in normal sense.
Iris Erlingsdottir : With Friends Like These....
Perhaps I haven't kept up with American legal developments as closely as I should have, but I am not aware that these are illegal actions. I have always been under the impression that: (1) freedom of speech and freedom of the press is guaranteed under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, (2) Iceland is a NATO ally of the United States, and (3) complaints about offense statements by individual members of friendly governments are handled through diplomatic channels, rather than through criminal investigations.
This incident is just one of a string of insults to Iceland's sovereignty. State Department cables leaked by WikiLeaks indicate that American diplomats have been ordered to gather the DNA and fingerprints of their international counterparts. In the past couple months, it was revealed that the United States embassy in Reykjavik had been monitoring its neighbors' activities. Apparently, our garbage presents a threat to the world's greatest superpower that our own police force was incapable of detecting and handling.
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Quixotic? Perhaps, but certainly not criminal. Rather than further damaging its lengthy close relationship with Iceland, it would be best if the United States called off its attack dogs, and instead made an effort to get to know us.
See Informationthread 33 and Informationthread 32 and Informationthread 31 for more info on Twittergate.