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It's not a matter of whether they're willing or not. They're compelled to by US federal law.

The best part is, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act, cops don't even need a judge or a warrant to get it anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

From 2003 to 2006, the FBI averaged about 65,000 NSLs sent - PER YEAR.

Twitter has the username to ip+timestamp mapping, your ISP has the ip+timestamp to name+physical address mapping.



This was a subpoena, not an NSL.


I don't blame Twitter, per se. But you've got to admit that the service loses a bit of social utility if it acts more like a documentation resource for the government than an anonymous communication service.

I mean, if you're going to make a stand, you'd figure doing it against a subpoena for what are essentially traffic violations would be a nice place to start.




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