Twitter subpoenaed over WikiLeaks

Narayan Lakshman

Washington: A federal court in the United States has issued a subpoena to micro-blogging website Twitter to obtain information on several individuals linked to WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, including its founder Julian Assange, said an Icelandic Member of Parliament also named in the case.

MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is reportedly a former volunteer with WikiLeaks, transmitted documents to several U.S. media outlets this week that showed an order from a court in Virginia to Twitter demanding subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, connection records and other data of several persons.

According to Ms. Jonsdottir, those whose information was subpoenaed included her, Mr. Assange, army intelligence officer Bradley Manning — who is currently in prison charged with leaking the documents to Wikileaks — and Rop Gonggrijp, said to be a computer hacker from the Netherlands.

War documents

The subpoena follows several statements made by the U.S. government over the last few months suggesting that it would sue WikiLeaks for publishing secret State Department cables and war documents relating to the U.S.' conflict engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to the court order of December 14, which was posted on the website of online magazine Salon, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found that the U.S. government had “offered specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The Guardian newspaper reported that the subpoena also targeted an account held by Jacob Applebaum, an American computer programmer “whose computer and phones were examined by U.S. officials in July after he was stopped returning from Holland to the U.S.”