The Twitter page of Birgitta Jonsdottir, one of the WikiLeaks associates involved in the case.
According to a U.S. District Court opinion in the case of three WikiLeaks associates, it should.
Judge Liam O’Grady ruled Thursday that the associates had no reasonable expectation of privacy when they used Twitter services, even if the information in question was known only to Twitter and not publicly disclosed. The government is seeking data from their accounts including their devices’ Internet protocol (IP) addresses, which can reveal information about location, and data on people with whom they communicated.
The WikiLeaks associates – Jacob Appelbaum, Birgitta Jonsdottir and Rop Gonggrijp – “voluntarily chose to use Internet technology to communicate with Twitter and thereby consented to whatever disclosures would be necessary to complete their communications,” Judge O’Grady wrote.
Judge O’Grady also denied the trio’s petition to unseal the parts of the government’s secret requests to Twitter and other service providers.
The ruling represents a setback for the WikiLeaks associates, who have not been charged with wrongdoing. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the government also has made requests to other Internet companies for information on Mr. Appelbaum, a computer developer for a nonprofit that provides free tools that help people maintain their anonymity online.
More broadly, the order raises questions about how much privacy people can expect as they use technology. The requests for information in this case were made without a search warrant, which requires a finding of “probable cause.” Instead, the government relied on a law that allows access to certain data if law enforcement shows “reasonable grounds” that the records would be “relevant and material” to an investigation – a lower standard.
That law is used routinely to get data such as IP information, addresses of people a user has emailed and messages that have been stored at a service provider longer than 180 days. It does not allow the collection of newer message contents or wiretaps of communications without a warrant. More
