As the United States tries to build its case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, prosecutors are seeking Twitter messages sent by supposed WikiLeaks supporters -- and possibly message information from Facebook, Skype and Google. At stake in the legal fight -- beyond placing criminal responsibility for thousands of classified U.S. documents being posted on the Internet -- is how much privacy Twitter and other social network users can expect or whether such messages are considered private at all.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation went to court in Alexandria, Va., last week to try to stop the government's acquisition of the Twitter messages.
An Assange lawyer said earlier an array of social networks, not just Twitter, was being mined by the government for information.
Ironically, the Alexandria hearing occurred on the same day President Barack Obama was publicly telling autocratic governments: "The world is changing … with a young, vibrant generation within the Middle East that is looking for greater opportunities. If you're governing these countries, you've got to get ahead of change; you can't get behind the curve."
Twitter and other forms of Internet social networking are given credit both for generating protests and keeping protesters in touch with each other. In Egypt and Tunisia, it led to regime change. Demonstrations inn Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere are continuing.
On the same day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was giving a speech advocating the freedom of the Internet. She told a crowd at The George Washington University in Washington: "Egypt isn't inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn't awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people."...
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