Oonagh ReidyIt’s Twitter’s birthday this week and they celebrated by releasing some astonishing figures, although some might now be wishing it was never born.
And if anyone is in doubt about the massive prowess the micro blogging site has, read on.
140 million tweets are sent daily which mounts up to one billion a week.
And the Twitterati are coming out in force with over 460,000 new users jumping aboard every day over the last month alone.
It is five years since chairman Jack Dorsey, sent the first tweet, which as a rule has to be 140 characters or less.
However despite these enormous feats, the celebratory mood over at head office must be dampened somewhat with the news that no account is sacred. From the US authorities at least.
According to reports coming out of the States, a federal court has ruled that the government may access the accounts and personal details of a number of figures at the centre of the Wikileaks investigation.
Authorities are seeking details on IP addresses, files transferred and times spent on individual Twitter accounts, according to Digital Wire Media.
Twitter may will now be forced to surrender the account details of Australian born Julian Assange, Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jonsdottir, as well as Bradley Manning, the US soldier thought to have leaked classified government info to the whistlewblower site, to authorities looking to establish the exact source of the leaks.
San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have challenged the order and are planning an appeal on behalf Birgitta Jonsdottir.
“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 recognise that people using digital tools deserve basic privacy.”
23 year old Manning is currenly in solitary confinement at a US marine corps base at Quantico as the chorus of protests demanding his release mounts.