Jónsdóttir was involved in the release of a video that shows U.S. military helicopters firing at two Reuters reporters in Iraq. Jónsdóttir believes that the U.S. government is after her to use in a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media,” stated Jonsdottir. “We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

The other two Twitter accounts that the U.S. government went after belongs to Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp. The government also sought Twitter records that belong to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

Apparently the Justice Department sought this information without a search warrant. But the Justice Department used a law that went into effect in 1994 called the Stored Communications Act, which gave them the ability for them to demand information from Twitter including the IP address of users, bank account details, user names, screen names, and mailing addresses. People that opposed the government’s decisions argued that this information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks. Judge Liam O’Grady disagreed and said that the information sought was to establish key facts related to ongoing investigation.

Twitter users volunteer to turn over their IP addresses when they sign up for the service. “Petitioners knew or should have known that their IP information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” said Judge O’Grady. The petitioners wanted to unseal the reason for why the Justice Department was seeking the account information, but the judge denied that request.

My opinion on this situation is that as adults we know there are consequences to every action. If you get your hands on any confidential document no matter if it belongs to the government of any country (not just the U.S.) and you expose it a public forum, then you are asking for your civil liberties to be jeopardized. I’m not a fan whatsoever with how the government is handling the wars overseas knowing that they make a lot of mistakes. But if I was a WikiLeaks volunteer and I was uploading confidential government documents, I would expect consequences to come my way.

I’m sure Julian Assange did not expect that he could keep leaking documents and stay away from consequences. He was doing what any other government activist would do… He was “fighting the man” and was ready to deal with consequences after.

[Guardian UK]

Assange urged people to go to a website for his support. “No doubt there will be many attempts made to try to spin these proceedings as they occurred today but they were merely technical. So please go to swedenversusassange.com if you wish to know what is really going on in this case,” said Assange.

If Assange is denied the right to appeal, then British law enforcement offices will have to arrange for him to be sent to Sweden within 10 days.

Julian Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, and Internet activist. WikiLeaks is a whistleblower website for worldwide news leaks with a purpose of creating open governments. WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents.

Appelbaum also pointed out that SafeHouse’s SSL server allows people to connect to forms of encryption that lack perfect forward secrecy. “That means anyone who takes their server or breaks into it could decrypt all their previous traffic,” stated Appelbaum.

The Wall Street Journal reserves the right to disclose any information to law enforcement authorities without notice unless that individual or group makes a special request for anonymity. SafeHouse recommend people to use Tor to hide their origin, but Tor is not compatible with SafeHouse’s Flash-based submission system. SafeHouse’s website states “You can be anonymous by not providing your name and contact information on this page,” but Appelbaum called this statement a “blatant lie.”

[Forbes]

Arab news network Al Jazeera recently started a similar service called ajtransparency.com. AJTransparency has been up and running since January 2011.

[Atlantic Times]

Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence.

Assange also pointed out that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! have user interfaces that automates data collection for U.S. Intelligence.

It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them.

It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.

[World News Australia]