Why Twitter Was the Only Company to Challenge the Secret WikiLeaks Subpoena

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http://www.fastcompany.com/1716100/why-twitter-was-the-only-company-to-challenge-the-secret-wikileaks-subpoena

Why Twitter Was the Only Company to Challenge the Secret WikiLeaks Subpoena

BY E.B. BOYDTue Jan 11, 2011

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Secret subpoenas of the kind the Department of Justice sent Twitter are apparently not unusual. In fact, other tech companies may also have received similar WikiLeaks-related requests. But what is unusual in this story is that Twitter resisted. Which raises an interesting question: Assuming that Twitter was not the only company to have been served a secret subpoena, why was it the only company that fought back? The answer might lie in the figure leading Twitter’s legal efforts, Alexander Macgillivray (right), an incredibly mild mannered (really) but sharp-as-a-tack cyber law expert.

Twitter’s general counsel comes out of Harvard’s prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the cyber law powerhouse that has churned out some of the leading Internet legal thinkers. The center was founded a little over a decade ago by none other than Charles Nesson, the famous defender of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. While at Harvard, Macgillivray helped teach a course on the law of cyberspace, along with Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Today Seltzer leads the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, a collaboration between several law schools and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks legal challenges to lawful online activity.

After Harvard, Macgillivray worked as a litigator for Silicon Valley super-firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati before moving to Google, where he first spearheaded legal issues for products like Search and Gmail. He soon found himself enmeshed in the fractious Google Books lawsuit. Observers credit Macgillivray’s agile mind and creative thinking with architecting with the Google Books Settlement--a solution that both enabled Google to lawfully scan the contents of university libraries and to create a mechanism for authors and publishers to get their out-of-print books back into circulation.

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With this solution, Twitter gets to act the part of good citizen—both to its users and to the government. But it leaves the job of taking a stand on the appropriateness of the subpoena itself to the targets. And indeed, two have said they plan to contest it. (One other said he is considering his options. The other two people named in the subpoena--other than the WikiLeaks account itself--are Julian Assange (who it’s not clear actually has his own Twitter feed) and Bradley Manning, the accused leaker who is currently being held in a military jail.)

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