Twitter Must Turn Over Records In Wikileaks CaseTwitter Must Turn Over Records In Wikileaks Case

A judge on Friday ruled in favor of the United States government, telling Twitter it must hand over records about three users who had contact with Wikileaks. Days later, on Monday, a group sympathetic to the controversial Web site leaked documents about Bank of America's foreclosure practices.

The order in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in United States v. Appelbaum upheld a prior ruling in the U.S. government's continuing investigation of Wikileaks. Judge Theresa Buchanan rejected the users' argument that the disclosure invades their right to privacy, stating that they voluntarily made their user information public once Twitter showed their posts.

The government wants Twitter to provide all Twitter account information, such as mailing addresses and screen names. In addition, government officials want Twitter information for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, as well as Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of providing Wikileaks with data.

Twitter successfully limited the time frame of the order to cover only the period of Nov. 15, 2009, to June 1, 2010, Bloomberg reported.

The three individuals -- @ioerror, or Jacob Appelbaum, an American computer security researcher and programmer; @birgittaj or Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament; and @rop_g or Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch activist and computer programmer -- were supported by attorneys, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which challenged the order on the grounds that it was overly broad and violated its clients' civil rights. The ACLU and EFF plan to appeal Judge Buchanan's ruling, the organizations said.

"We had also sought to make public court documents concerning the government's attempts to collect private records from Twitter and other companies. The court agreed to make public all of the documents related to the users' legal challenge to the order to Twitter, but rejected our request to make public documents the government had filed in order to obtain that order," the ACLU said on its Web site. "Our privacy in our Internet communications should not be so easily sacrificed."

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Peter Carr, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride, declined to comment to Bloomberg. Likewise, Twitter had no comment, according to the Washington Post.

"Time to apply pressure on social media to move their servers out of the USA if this ruling holds, your info is not save [sic]," tweeted Jonsdottir after the judge's order. "Ruling gives the government the ability to secretly amass private info related to individuals' Internet communications."

While some may disagree with Wikileaks' actions in publicly posting sensitive information about government communications and business relationships, the recent court rulings could have far-reaching effects, said Cindy Cohn, EFF legal director, in a statement.

"With so much of our digital private information being held by third parties -- whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter -- the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself," she said. "We're disappointed that the court did not recognize that people using digital tools deserve basic privacy and that the government should be required to meet a high standard before it demands private information about you from the online services you use, be they Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, or Skype."

Days after the judge's ruling, hacker group Anonymous released a flurry of emails that it said showed deceptive mortgage practices at Bank of America. Late last year, Assange had threatened to set loose emails in early 2011 about wrongdoing at a large bank. While Wikileaks has yet to provide these emails, some industry watchers wonder if Anonymous posted the emails in Wikileaks' stead.

The leak allegedly came from an unnamed former employee of Balboa Insurance, which was acquired by Bank of America in 2008, then sold to QBE Group. In the emails, the source claims the bank deleted numbers used to identify loan insurance accounts, a move designed to help it foreclose on home loans.

"We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," a Bank of America spokesman told Reuters on Sunday.

Although many servers that hosted the leaks were apparently down, a number of other sites mirrored the documents, according to Anonymous' Twitter postings under the OperationLeakS ID.