A federal judge on Thursday ordered Twitter to give up information about three account holders under investigation for possible connections to WikiLeaks. The decision rejected an appeal by the three account holders that argued their IP addresses should be considered private.

Those account holders — Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp and Birgitta Jonsdottir — have addressed the situation on Twitter. Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen, used his feed to direct users to a blog post arguing that the decision is a blow to Internet privacy.



"The consequences of this decision for me are extremely limited: there’s not a whole lot you can learn from records that Twitter has on me that you can’t learn from reading my blog," he wrote. "There are bigger principles at stake though, and this is not a good ruling for online privacy."



Jonsdottir's feed led readers to an Electronic Frontier Foundation article on the subject with her quote: "With this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the U.S. that the U.S. government will have secret access to their data."



Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, stated: “Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days."



The case began in January when the U.S. government subpoenaed Twitter to hand over private messages between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others within the organization. The EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union and attorneys representing WikiLeaks fought the subpoena, but in March, a federal judge granted the U.S. government access to the accounts.



That led to another round of appeals, which Judge Liam O'Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., rejected on Thursday. O'Grady's 60-page opinion stated that Twitter users "voluntarily" hand over their IP addresses when they sign up for an account and agree to Twitter's terms and conditions. Twitter's privacy policy states that it "may disclose information about an account if Twitter believes it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request."



Representatives from Twitter could not be reached for comment on the decision.





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Image courtesy of Flickr, shawncampbell