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

Matt Yglesias isn't buying my story that skyrocketing Wall Street earnings—and the skyrocketing incomes of the super-rich in general—are basically coming out of the pockets of the working and middle classes:

I think what Kevin’s story keeps missing is a plausible causal account of how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the median wage earner....I can tell you a story about how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the broad class of rich people in the 80th-99th percentile who own the bulk of the financial assets in the country by swindling them. I can tell you a story about how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the broad class of rich people via the income tax and “bailouts.” But the median wage earner seems harder to me.

The Great Middle Class Swindle | Mother Jones

France's second city, Lyon, undergoes a mind-bending transformation during the Fête des Lumières, an extraordinary festival of lights. null

Video: France: Lyon's dazzling Festival of Lights - Telegraph

I've changed by profile picture to support EFF's anti-censorship campaign, and I have donated $100 to their cause. This is a protest and I urge you to participate. We are protesting the use of political pressure by American politicians to shut down a website.

If you believe in due process of law and the right to freedom of expression you should join us in taking a stand. It is important that we take a stand right now.

It doesn't matter whether or not you support what Wikileaks is doing. If I were handed such a rich trove of private information I might have moral qualms about dumping the whole thing on the Internet. That is totally irrelevant.

In the United States of America we are a country of laws. If Wikileaks has violated a law than the appropriate way to respond to that is through the use of the legal system. In fact, like it or not, it is most likely the case that Wikileaks has not violated the law. Therefore, senior politicians in this country have taken it upon themselves to use their personal influence to shut the website down, and a number of corporations, large and small, have obliged them.

In a free country with a strong legal system and a tradition of upholding the right to freedom of speech, this sort of thing is not acceptable. Life, liberty, and property should only be taken away through due process of law and not simply because some powerful people desire it and present thin arguments in favor of it.

As The Internet Society recently stated in their newsletter:

[Wikileaks] must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites. Free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.

Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence...

Anger about these events runs deep. Right now, many of the companies who assisted in cutting off Wikileaks have been subjected to distributed denial of service attacks. While I share the anger of those who are launching these attacks, I cannot condon... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Taking a principled stand on Wikileaks

WikiLeaks may well make us uncomfortable in some of what it does, though in general I believe it's done far more good than harm so far. We need to recognize, however, as Mathew Ingram wrote over the weekend, that "Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a Media Entity." What our government is trying to do to WikiLeaks now is lawless in stunning ways, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald forcefully argued today.

These are also acts of outright censorship. No, Amazon is not bound by the First Amendment. But if it's bowing to government pressure, it's helping a panicked government tear up one of our most basic freedoms.

Defend WikiLeaks or lose free speech - Dan Gillmor - Salon.com

The US "IP Czar," Victoria Espinel, said at a conference this week that Homeland Security's seizure of a bunch of domain names was apparently just the beginning of a larger plan to go after such folks.

US Copyright Czar: Expect More Domain Censorship | Techdirt

EDITORIAL: Wave goodbye to Internet freedom
FCC crosses the Rubicon into online regulation
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
7:02 p.m., Thursday, December 2, 2010

With a straight face, Mr. Genachowski suggested that government red tape will increase the "freedom" of online services that have flourished because bureaucratic busybodies have been blocked from tinkering with the Web. Ordinarily, it would be appropriate at this point to supply an example from the proposed regulations illustrating the problem. Mr. Genachowski's draft document has over 550 footnotes and is stamped "non-public, for internal use only" to ensure nobody outside the agency sees it until the rules are approved in a scheduled Dec. 21 vote. So much for "openness."

EDITORIAL: Wave goodbye to Internet freedom

The Homeland Security Department's customs enforcement division has gone on a Web site shutdown spree, closing down at least 76 domains this week, according to online reports....

Earlier this week, Homeland Security shut down a popular hip-hop music site, RapGodfathers.com, which had nearly 150,000 members. The site claims it is compliant with copyright laws, as it doesn't host copyrighted materials. However, its users posted links to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload, where copyrighted material may have been shared.

More...

What’s most disturbing in the case of OnSmash and RapGodfathers is that both sites claim to have complied with any DMCA removal requests. In the case of OnSmash specifically, the labels themselves gave the site the song links which OS provided to the public.

Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order | Raw Story

This rant takes a few weak swings but there are also many damning blows.

The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...

Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election....

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation?

Read the whole thing...

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich? - NYTimes.com

The idea that baby boomers weren't paying enough taxes to cover their social security benefits has been well understood for 20 years or more. Nothing has been done about it yet. Now, of course, it is too late to ask them to pay their share because they are too old to pay and too close to retirement to adjust to changes in their plans. Now that we're close enough to seal the deal for the boomers, we're going to "fix" the problem by cutting benefits for the next generation.

Folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren't going to get Social Security at 65 or 67.

They are also going to cut the mortgage interest deduction, pouring gasoline on top of the housing market debacle that is crushing the middle class, and they are going to cut income taxes for the super wealthy.

After not doing anything at all about the civil liberties issues that prompted many young people to vote for him, Obama is going to turn around fuck our economic future. Go team Obama!

You are getting fucked because you are not a large enough demographic group to matter politically.

Debt Commissioners: Baby Boomers Will Crush Social Security, Medicare - FoxNews.com