A federal magistrate judge in Virginia ruled Friday that Twitter must hand over the records of three of its users as part of an investigation into WikiLeaks.
The ruling stems from a December 14 court filing that required Twitter to disclose private information about the users' accounts. The government initially wanted to keep the proceedings private, but documents were unsealed at the request of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), which tried unsuccessfully to get a judge to bar access to the Twitter accounts.
The users in question are Rop Gonggrijp, Jacob Appelbaum, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament.
"Our policy is designed to let users defend themselves. Twitter will continue to let the judicial process run its course," Twitter said in a statement on its Twitter feed.
The ACLU and EFF said they plan to appeal.
"This ruling gives the government the ability to secretly amass private information related to individuals' Internet communications. Except in extraordinary circumstances, the government should not be able to obtain this information in secret. That's not how our system works," Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement. "If this ruling stands, our client may be prevented from challenging the government's requests to other companies because she might never know if and how many other companies have been ordered to turn over information about her."
"With so much of our digital private information being held by third parties – whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter – the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "We're disappointed that the court did not recognize that people using digital tools deserve basic privacy and that the government should be required to meet a high standard before it demands private information about you from the online services you use, be they Twitter, Facebook, Gmail or Skype."