What's going on with Twitter...? Are we seeing censorship take hold...?

disturbing...

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Imagine my surprise this morning when, without warning, my shiny new Twitter account (@d_seaman) was suspended and taken offline.

No more tweets for you. You now have 0 followers.

My crime? Talking too much about Occupy Wall Street (I'm not an Occupier, but as a blogger and journalist it strikes me as one of the most important stories out there -- hence the constant coverage), and talking too much about the controversial detainment without trial provisions contained in the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which would basically shred the Bill of Rights and subject American citizens to military police forces. The same level of civil rights protection that enemy combatants in a cave in Afghanistan receive!

But no, my tweets were 'annoying our users,' according to Twitter's suspension notice.

Well, not so much: nearly everyone following me appreciated my coverage of this issue, when few others in the media have had an interest in the NDAA or the widespread Occupy turnouts all over the country last night.

If they didn't appreciate it, ignorant bliss is only an 'unfollow' away. So why was I suspended only for covering two very serious news stories, and offering my own brand of commentary? I wasn't harassing users. I wasn't spamming. I wasn't hawking affiliate or porn links or any of the trash that should get one swiftly suspended from Twitter. (I've received some spam direct messages already; funny that those aren't suspended, but I was.)

I have contacted Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, and several tech journalists hoping to get some answers. I don't want to start a big thing -- I just want my account reactivated. This is America, not Iran, thanks in advance.

Also: it's worth questioning why #NDAA and #OWS, which are receiving consistently VERY high volumes of conversation/tweet traffic are not trending at all on Twitter, yet their featured 'worldwide trends' this morning include: Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, #myfavoritefood, and Kindergarten Cop.

yes, i know, everyone's on edge right now, and rightly so... we don't need to leap to any hysterical conclusions but, at the same time, we would be foolish not to be looking at anything and everything with a very critical eye...

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Twitter of the day: Mubarak is Egypt's first zombie president

i love it...

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Internet back up in Egypt

that's according to a tweet from sharif kouddous who's in cairo and has been reporting for democracy now...

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Out of Egypt, a work-around for the internet "kill" switch and Twitter

this is the kind of creativity and technological innovation that gives me hope...

[A] group of hackers is close to delivering software that could turn laptops into low-cost Internet routers—and help protesters organize.

Hours after the government in Egypt shut down that country’s access to the Internet, hackers around the world started banding together to craft some kind of workaround. And one group claims to be only a day or two away from delivering a partial solution.

Their initiative is called the Open Mesh Project and it began when Shervin Pishevar, an Internet entrepreneur in Palo Alto, California, posted a message on Twitter calling for help shipping software into Egypt that could turn regular laptops into low-cost Internet routers, forming what’s known as a “mesh network,” where each computer can route messages along to the others.

and this to assist twitter messages...

Google launched an Internet-free workaround for Twitter users in Egypt, whose Internet and cell phone service has been disabled. ... Working with engineers from Twitter, Google developed a call-in system that allows users to dictate messages over a landline, which are then transcribed and posted.

what a day and it just keeps on coming...!

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Social networking

a few observations on social networking...

despite my advanced age - 63 - i've generally been and continue to be pretty much up on the latest electronic media and related gadgets... i guess it's a necessity in my line of work where i regularly find myself based for weeks at a time in a wide variety of countries spread across several continents and both northern and southern hemispheres... if i wasn't up on the communication opportunities provided by the internet, i would essentially be up shit creek...

i started this weblog almost six years ago in 2005, a bit behind the pioneers but ahead of many, including most of my peers who, at that time, didn't know a blog from their left cheek...

i put the blog on twitter almost a year ago, so all my blog posts are automatically tweeted but, other than that, i haven't paid much attention to twitter... i've avoided facebook like the plague, i guess because it seems just a little bit too sorority/fraternity-esque for my taste and, at this particular point, i will probably continue to stay away... in truth, the whole notion of "social" in the "social networking" concept leaves me cold...

so, imagine my surprise when i, for no other reason than simple curiosity, started following my twitter home page in mid-january, just prior to leaving for my current assignment here in kosovo... just remembering to bring up my twitter home page required, as you can imagine, a shift in my ingrained web surfing habits, and, once i got into the habit of regularly bringing it up, i initially wasn't overly impressed... yeah, i added some interesting people to follow - glenn greenwald, emptywheel, greg mitchell, and the like - and was interested to see that their tweets often reinforced and amplified their longer pieces i was accustomed to reading in salon and the nation, but nothing in their various tweets struck me as significantly more valuable than what i was accustomed to following on the more traditional sites...

that all changed with the events in tunisia and egypt... what i am experiencing now is the full-blown immediacy of being on the front lines of a major world event in a way that the traditional news media or even the alternative internet news media couldn't possibly deliver... reading the tweets from sharifkouddous, a native egyptian who is tweeting and broadcasting live for democracy now from cairo adds a three-dimensionality to the goings-on that is breathtaking... i now see "social networking," at least the twitter variety, from a completely new perspective and i'm in awe of its power...

ok... i'm a convert...

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The only reason we know about the Wikileaks Twitter subpoena is because it was ordered unsealed [UPDATE]

which begs the question...

glenn...

And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone.

i think there's only one logical answer to glenn's question... since the twitter subpoena was issued on december 14 and ordered to be kept sealed (it "barred the company from notifying anyone, including the users, of the existence of the Order") and, only at twitter's request, was ordered unsealed on january 5, it seems entirely likely that those other companies have received the same order but have not chosen to request that their orders be unsealed... as glenn points out, "had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users"...

also, given that the twitter subpoena includes "a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee [of Iceland's Parliament] and the NATO parliamentary assembly" (Birgitta Jónsdóttir) it appears that our government has gotten itself into some seriously deep shit on this matter to say nothing of dramatically escalating its war against transparency...

p.s. on reflection, i'm somewhat puzzled at why the government is even bothering with a subpoena when i'm reasonably positive that massive government "sniffer" programs routinely capture in real time any and all data transmissions of any and all services that utilize public networks... could it be that they only want to make the appearance of a legitimate legal effort...? then, otoh, "making an appearance" would suggest that secrecy wouldn't have been mandated for the order... is there something about accessing twitter data in particular that makes a subpoena necessary...?

[UPDATE]

from the guardian...

WikiLeaks has demanded that Google and Facebook reveal the contents of any US subpoenas they may have received after it emerged that a court in Virginia had ordered Twitter to secretly hand over details of accounts on the micro-blogging site by five figures associated with the group, including Julian Assange.

Amid strong evidence that a US grand jury has begun a wide-ranging trawl for details of what networks and accounts WikiLeaks used to communicate with Bradley Manning, the US serviceman accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, some of those named in the subpoena said they would fight disclosure.

[...]

The specific clause of the Patriot act used to acquire the subpoena is one that the FBI has described as necessary for "obtaining such records [that] will make the process of identifying computer criminals and tracing their internet communications faster and easier".

The subpoena itself is an unusual one known as a 2703(d). Recently a federal appeals court ruled this kind of order was insufficient to order the disclosure of the contents of communication. Significantly, however, that ruling is binding in neither Virginia – where the Twitter subpoena was issued – nor San Francisco where Twitter is based.

[...]

Gonggrijp [Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp ... (is one of the) "producers" of the first significant leak from the US cables cache: a video of an Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and journalists in Baghdad] praised Twitter for notifying him and others that the US had subpoenaed his details. "It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."

i'm glad they're trying to force this stuff out in the open...

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