A federal court order might give US security services access to information on the 637 000 Wikileaks supporters of the online short-message service Twitter as part of an investigation.

On last Friday, Twitter had announced to have won a legal process to reveal that the US Department of Justice obtained a subpoena requesting data going back to Nov. 1 2009, that are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation." The court is seeking confidential information on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, his source for the classified documents, Bradley Manning, and three of his supporters - the Icelandic Parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and US computer programmer Jacob Appelbaum. According to a copy of the court order that has been published, the demand also includes the revelation of a variety of information, including session times and mailing addresses. This basically means that all the 637 000 Twitter followers of the WikiLeaks account can be a possible target.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has publicly condemned the harassment of these individuals and stated that some of the people named in the subpoena helped WikiLeaks making public US military video of an Apache helicopter shooting civilians in Iraq in 2007.

MEPs worried with data privacy issues declared yesterday that the US attitude clearly shows that governments must revise the question of access to private data and that US government can’t impose their rules on the whole world.

The European deputies also reaffirmed that the Twitter subpoena has no legal base for accessing all that data, but the possibility of minimizing data transfers to US need to be discussed urgently. The highly contested EU legislation on data retention is coming up for review by the European Commission in March five years after it entered into life.

On the contrary, US government has acted in order to protect people judged by officials to be in danger because of the document leak. Also on last Friday, the State spokesperson alleged that the department has helped relocating "a handful of people" named in the diplomatic documents to be out of concern for their own safety.