Twitter Information Fair Game in WikiLeaks Probe

Prosecutors can demand information about users from Twitter to advance ongoing investigations into WikiLeaks, a federal magistrate ruled March 11, the Associated Press reports.

The decision removes hurdles for the Justice Department, currently in the midst of a grand jury probe into the leak of hundreds of thousands of classified documents published by the whistleblower website over the past year.

The Justice Department demanded that Twitter hand over account details of WikiLeaks' supporters last December, prompting a backlash on the Internet.

"The disclosures sought are 'relevant and material' to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry," the court ruled. The 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows prosecutors to obtain data through a court order if they can demonstrate that it is gathering this information as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The court said that it had found no violation of the First Amendment in ordering Twitter to produce its users' information. "Petitioners, who have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available, fail to explain how the Twitter Order has a chilling effect," the decision stated.

The three who petitioned to reverse the court order against them -- technologist Rop Gonggrijp, encryption developer Jacob Appelbaum, and former WikiLeaks developer and Icelandic Member-of-Parliament, Birgitta Jonsdottir -- will be appealing the case.

Since petitioners "voluntarily conveyed" private information -- such as their IP addresses -- to Twitter, they didn't have a right to be protected from searches of what they had disclosed, the court argued.