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YouTube - You Should Work for Symantec

Requested content of direct messages with no showing of probable cause or individualized suspicion!

That could allow the account holders to claim that the 2703(d) order is unconstitutional. (One federal appeals court recently ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, a 2703(d) order is insufficient for the contents of communications and search warrant is needed, although that decision is not binding in Virginia or San Francisco.)

I think there will be a binding precedent in those circuits forthwith.

A Twitter representative declined to comment on any specific legal requests, but told CNET: "To help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so."

Buchanan's original order from last month directed Twitter not to disclose "the existence of the investigation" to anyone, but that gag order was lifted this week.

It's unclear why Buchanan changed her mind. Twitter didn't immediately respond to questions, but the most likely scenario is that its attorneys objected to the 2703(d) order on grounds that the law required that account holders be notified, and that the broad gag order was not contemplated by Congress when creating (d) orders in 1986 and could run afoul of the First Amendment.

The gag order also appears to have violated DOJ policies.

DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre | feature | Art and design | The Observer

Greenwald just threw down at Poulson regarding the Manning - Lamo chat logs.

For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed -- but refuses to publish -- the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories:  the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. In late May, Adrian Lamo -- at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning -- gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs:  Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The way to win at manipulating people is to provide a simple, incorrect assumption for people to jump to, and then make sure that the truth is so complicated and convoluted that people either won't be able to put all the threads together and understand it or they will simply gravitate toward the lie out of sheer intellectual laziness. This works because the truth is usually complicated and people who are interested in the truth are unlikely to fight back with simple narratives that are untrue. I say this as someone who is interested in the truth and has observed that in the public eye bullshit almost always seems to win. Bullshit wins because the truth is challenging to comprehend and the liars are offering you easy answers.

And what about the name, octothorpe?

It was born somewhere in the Bell system in the 1970s, when touchtone became established.

What we have here is one of the great comeback stories in the history of competitive punctuation

A message in a bottle delivered to a Confederate general during the American Civil War has been deciphered, 147 years after it was written.

BBC News - Coded American Civil War message in bottle deciphered

In 2000 the information sector employed 3.6 million workers.* By 2007, just before the recession started, the number was down to 3 million, and in 2009, the information sector had shrunk to 2.8 million. That’s a 23% decline in 9 years.

The information technology industry has shed one in four jobs in the past decade.

The information technology job contraction...

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

NYT's Christmas Day editorial concerns the financial industry disconnection of wikileaks sans due process. I think there is more to say that what was said here, but at least they said something...

Banks and WikiLeaks - NYTimes.com

Christian soldiers, marching as to war in the pitched battle for the meaning of Christmas, worry that Santa is a tool of the vast Satanic conspiracy. To be sure, the similarity of their names, identical but for one transposed letter, is provocative.

I think I somehow failed to post this last year... I'm dreaming of a red x-mas...

Mark Dery on The vast Santanic conspiracy