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Twitter / Wikileaks : DoJ Subpoena

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U.S. Subpoenas Twitter Over WikiLeaks Supporters. DoJ Subpoena Proves Twitter’s Value — and Its Weakness. Thoughts on the DOJ court order. The world's media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks. Communications privacy law is exceedingly complex, and unfortunately, none of the legal experts who actually specialize in this area (people like Orin Kerr, Paul Ohm, Jennifer Granick and Kevin Bankston) have yet to chime in with their thoughts. As such, many commentators and journalists are completely botching their analysis of this interesting event.

While I'm not a lawyer, the topic of government requests to Internet companies is the focus of my dissertation, so I'm going to try to provide a bit of useful analysis. However, as always, I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. A quick introduction to the law The order to twitter It is the second part of the order that is more interesting.

Reading between the lines 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Why Twitter Was the Only Company to Challenge the Secret WikiLeaks Subpoena. Alexander Macgillivray" />Secret subpoenas* information requests 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 order, 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.

Twitter wooed Macgillivray away from Google in the summer of 2009, and he now heads a 25-person legal team.