On December 14, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice served Twitter with a 18 U.S.C. §2703(d) order seeking account and communications data linked to Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Rop Gonggrijp, Jacob Appelbaum, and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir. The order was accompanied by a 18 U.S.C. §2705(b) gag provision that barred Twitter from disclosing its existence. Requested information reportedly included usernames, addresses, telephone numbers, financial-account details, and records connected to stored communications. Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens argued that the order could expose identifying information associated with approximately 634,000 WikiLeaks followers, although the source notes that some details rely on non-primary reporting.
Twitter challenged the secrecy requirement rather than immediately notifying the affected users. On January 5, 2011, the company was allowed to disclose the order and give users ten days to contest it; Jonsdottir then publicly announced that U.S. prosecutors sought data concerning her Twitter activity since November 1, 2009. The source says the records had not yet been turned over when the disclosure became possible, but a federal judge upheld the government’s request on March 11, 2011. The episode intensified criticism of secret electronic-information demands—reported by the source as exceeding 50,000 annually—and made Twitter’s challenge an influential example of a platform resisting a government gag order.
