In this news from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Court Rules Against Privacy in Battle Over Twitter Records

Federal court ruling, passed down today in Virginia, stated that the government can in fact collect all of the records of the three users of Twitter that they wanted to investigate in the WikiLeaks cases.
Sadly they also ruled that the users and the public at large may be completely prevented from seeing the documents that they used to justify WHY they need the records.

The facts are that they choose to operate in complete privacy and to not even tell the people whose records they were trying to take, that they were requesting them.

Sadly this type of behavior is becoming more and more common, with those under investigation having online files from social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook being requested without offering reasons for that request. The secrecy with which these requests are made and the lack of justification for them to the public is not acceptable in the United States.

The only real up side was that the courts did deny the request to have the hearing about the records in secrecy and according to the EFF “and the court made public all of the documents related to the users’ legal challenge.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union plan to appeal the decision on behalf of their client Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian.”

Sadly, the government tried to hide all of their actions, moving about under cloaks and the only reason that the requests were even known was that Twitter actually contacted the customers and made sure that they had clear understanding of what was happening so that they had the chance to respond to the demands.

The ACLU and EFF also asked the court to make public any similar orders to any other companies.

“This ruling gives the government the ability to secretly amass private information related to individuals’ Internet communications. Except in extraordinary circumstances, the government should not be able to obtain this information in secret. That’s not how our system works,” said Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “If this ruling stands, our client may be prevented from challenging the government’s requests to other companies because she might never know if and how many other companies have been ordered to turn over information about her.”

“With so much of our digital private information being held by third parties – whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like Twitter – the government can track your every move and statement without you ever having a chance to protect yourself,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “We’re disappointed that the court did not recognize that people using digital tools deserve basic privacy and that the government should be required to meet a high standard before it demands private information about you from the online services you use, be they Twitter, Facebook, Gmail or Skype.”

Both the EFF and the ACLU plan an appeal on the case as it stands. more information is available to you on the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

For background on the Twitter Case, this link will offer you the history:

https://www.eff.org/cases/government-demands-twitter-records