Political India: Engaging America

While the Internet's democratisation of communication has empowered the ordinary citizen to engage with those quite distant to them in the real world, this compression of cyber-distance has raised the thorny of question of whether groups such as the Taliban have the right to freely post anti-West messages.

The latest controversy surrounding this issue has fixed the spotlight on the United States government's efforts to pressure microblog site Twitter to cancel the accounts of pro-Taliban tweeters.

The Los Angeles Times highlighted the role of lawmakers such as Senator Joe Lieberman, Independent and Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “to persuade Internet companies to remove videos and blog posts that he says promote terrorism or offer instructions on how to commit violence.”

Though Twitter feeds ostensibly from the Taliban first appeared last year in Arabic and Pashto, the LA Times reported, an English-language feed started in April and many of its posts referred to U.S. troops in inflammatory terms.

At the heart of the issue is a deeply troubling question for U.S. foreign policy itself — the fact that there has been flip-flopping on the question of whether the Taliban is the enemy or a partner in the future Afghan state.

A lack of consistency on this matter has meant that the State Department has not listed the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, a fact that Twitter executives were said to have underscored to the likes of Mr. Lieberman. So long as the Taliban is not an FTO, they are reported to have argued, the microblog posts are in no way a violation the Twitter's terms of service.

Yet it is undeniable that the U.S. and more generally the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul is feeling the cyber-heat, a view corroborated by the fact that the ISAF has engaged in a cyber-battle with a specific pro-Taliban account.

The ISAF Twitter account is @ISAFmedia, with 16,000-plus followers and its detractor is the @ABalkhi, with 3,000-plus followers.

Hammering out dozens of tweets per day and trading allegations over specific attacks by either side, these exchanges create the impression of an ugly online brawl.

Most recently the Taliban tweeter highlighted claims that NATO forces were using Afghan mercenaries and noted on Thursday: “@ISAFmedia - your officials admitted to it dumb dumb.” In response the ISAF tweeter wrote: “@ABalkhi - Dumb dumb? How the dialogue elevates. Look: Nobody takes you seriously. Everything you type is wrong. Just. Stop.”

Labels: cyberspace, ISAF, Taliban, Twitter

From The Hindu

A federal court in the United States has issued a subpoena to social networking website Twitter to obtain information on several individuals linked to Wikileaks, the whistleblower website, including its spokesperson Julian Assange, an Icelandic Member of Parliament also named in the case said.

MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is reportedly a former volunteer with Wikileaks, transmitted documents to severalU.S. media outlets this week that showed an order from a court in Virginia to Twitter demanding subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, connection records and other data of several persons.

According to Ms. Jonsdottir those whose information was subpoenaed included her, Mr. Assange, army intelligence officer Bradley Manning, who is currently in prison charged with leaking the documents to Wikileaks and Rop Gonggrijp, said to be a computer hacker from the Netherlands.

The subpoena follows several statements made by the U.S. government over the last few months suggesting that it would sue Wikileaks for publicly publishing secret State Department cables and war documents relating to the U.S.’ conflict engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to the court order of December 14, which was posted on the website of online magazine Salon, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia found that the U.S. government had “offered specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

While the initial order by the court was sealed and Twitter was directed not to disclose the existence of the U.S. government’s subpoena application to the Twitter clients involved, that order was subsequently reversed, reportedly after Twitter mounted a legal challenge to the initial order.

On Friday Ms. Jonsdottir said that she had received a message from Twitter which said, “We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account @birgittaj. The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account.”

Soon after, Wikileaks said in a statement, “Today, the existence of a secret U.S. government grand jury espionage investigation into WikiLeaks was confirmed for the first time as a subpoena was brought into the public domain.”

The Guardian newspaper reported that the subpoena also targeted an account held by Jacob Applebaum, an American computer programmer “whose computer and phones were examined by U.S. officials in July after he was stopped returning from Holland to the U.S.”

Mr. Assange was quoted as saying, “If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out.”

Neither Twitter nor the U.S. government have commented on the subpoena yet, with Twitter only saying only that its policy was “to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.”

Labels: cablegate, Twitter, Wikileaks