Ryan Singel, at Wired's Threat Level Blog, presents a laudatory analysis of Twitter's decision to challenge the DoJ's move, during a secret Grand Jury investigation in Virgina, to subpoena the private details of various accounts related to WikiLeaks. WL Central has covered this issue in detail (listed at the bottom of this post. Singel's article presents Twitter's decision in an industrial context, and plays counterpoint to the idea that "good corporate citizenship" should always mean complying with government wishes whenever that seems expedient.
From:WIRED.COM: Twitter's Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard
Of course, it's not the first time tech companies have stood up to requests for user data. Google beat back a government order to turn over search logs in 2006, after AOL and Microsoft quietly acquiesced. We've seen ISPs stand up for their users when movie studios try to force ISPs turn over user information in mass peer-to-peer lawsuits. And just last year, Yahoo successfully resisted the Justice Department's argument that it didn't need a warrant to read a user's e-mails once the user had read them.
But there's not yet a culture of companies standing up for users when governments and companies come knocking with subpoenas looking for user data or to unmask an anonymous commenter who says mean things about a company or the local sheriff.
In the WikiLeaks probe, it's not yet clear whether the feds dropped the same order on other companies.
Regardless, Twitter deserves recognition for its principled upholding of the spirit of the First Amendment. It's a shame that PayPal, Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and the U.S. government all failed - and continue to to fail - at their own versions of that test.
Other Coverage of the Twitter Subpoena on WL Central
2011-01-07 Twitter Details & Messages of Birgitta Jónsdóttir Subpoenaed
2011-01-08 U.S. DOJ Twitter Subpoena Updates
2011-01-08 Twitter on censorship: No censorship on Twitter
2011-01-09 U.S. DOJ access to information on Twitter followers
2011-01-09 DOJ subpoena applicable to non-Twitter users who viewed tweets?
2011-01-09 Government Requests for Twitter Users' Personal Information Raise Serious Constitutional Concerns, Says ACLU
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I've tweeted once a reaction
I've tweeted once a reaction to the title on Singel's article, which has circulated widely through Twitter: "Twitter's response should be the industry standard."
Twitter's response should be the standard that every citizen of a democracy aspires to live up to imo. Why the "industry" standard? It is shocking and frightening, I agree, to see so many corporations behave as though the executive branch of government defines what the law is, so it is heartening to see one corporation at least resist that kind of anti-democratic creep.
But appeals to corporate giants are not going to save democracy if huge numbers of citizens don't recognize what is going wrong and their own responsibility to resist it.