Twitter’s reputation is decidedly on the rise in the wake of the WikiLeaks Subpoena scandal, as the organization fought to reveal the Obama Administration’s efforts to obtain data on the whistleblower and its followers, but it is also raising questions about other companies.
Given the broad nature of the subpoenas, it is widely assumed that the administration is looking to cull information from wherever it may be found, and this is leaving sites like Facebook and Google facing questions about where their announcements are.
Google’s own user privacy rules would suggest they would follow a similar tack of Twitter in challenging the legality of “secret” orders to obtain user data, but so far neither this company nor any of the other likely targets has come forward to confirm or deny this.
In addition to Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and others directly associated with WikiLeaks, the terms of the Twitter subpoena could potentially cull data from hundreds of thousands of other users who read the tweets of such users.
If Twitter or Facebook is wrapped up in corporate consumerist apologetics, then no real American Patriot or Citizen can , or should, believe thy will do the right thing.
What on earth would the DOD do with thousands of useless names and contact details? Start a second-hand fan club? Once they have trawled through them to look for patterns and identify/confirm suspects, what will they do with the data?
I have cancelled my FB profile, no longer use Google as a search engine, and have hidden my IP identity. Now what did those thousands of Twitter fans do out of fear? The DOD's fear campaign is just a sham.
I guess by "change you can believe in" he meant Soviet style secrecy and unaccountable.