Last fall the website of the Boston Police department was hacked by the Occupy movement, the Police department has an ongoing investigation ever since.
The district attorney in charge of the case asked twitter to reveal the data information of a user that tweeted regarding the Occupy movement, the court order included the name on the twitter account, Guido Fawkes, @p0isAn0n. After the court order was issued, on December 28th, the user tweeted: “Haha. Boston PD submitted to Twitter for my information. Lololol? For what? Posting info pulled from public domains? #comeatmebro.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was one of the opponents of the court order. The organization challenged the measure in court. The proceedings and documents of the court regarding the case were sealed.
Peter Krupp, cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts said: “The ACLU challenged the lawfulness of this administrative subpoena and was told by the Superior Court that we did not have standing,” “As a result of these various proceedings, the Superior Court ordered the documents produced.”
And after three months Twitter agreed to give the information of one of their users: @p0isAn0n.
Matt Graves, Twitter’s spokesman told Boston.com that @p0isAn0n is the only account, that they provided information, and then he declined to comment on how Twitter dealt with the request for information related to the Occupy Boston account.
And after Twitter gave the information Peter Krupp (Attorney for the ACLU) said: “We continue to believe that our client has a constitutional right to speak, and to speak anonymously; and that this administrative subpoena both exceeded the scope of the administrative subpoena statute and infringed our client’s rights under the First Amendment,” “With the turnover of these documents any subsequent review of these issues will be moot.”
This will make a precedent on how the government can ask for the private information on the Social Networks, in this case Twitter. We’ll see what happens next.
