US judge orders Twitter to give up WikiLeaks data

              A US judge Friday ordered Twitter to hand over the data of three users in contact with the activist site WikiLeaks, rejecting arguments the move would violate their rights to privacy and free speech.
President Barack Obama's administration won a court order last year seeking information from the Twitter accounts as it considers action against WikiLeaks, which has released a flood of diplomatic documents.

The accounts on the micro-blogging service belong to Icelandic lawmaker Birgitta Jonsdottir, US computer researcher Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch volunteer for WikiLeaks.
Judge Theresa Buchanan, based in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the argument made by the three Twitter users' that the order would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech.
"The Twitter order does not seek to control or direct the content of petitioners' speech or association," she wrote.
She said the three "already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available" and voluntarily provided information to Twitter pursuant to the website's privacy policy.
Buchanan also dismissed the argument that the order violated the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects people against "unreasonable" searches.
The Twitter users "voluntarily conveyed their IP addresses to the Twitter website, thus exposing the information to a third party administrator, and thereby relinquishing any reasonable expectation of privacy," she said.
WikiLeaks, which has strongly criticized the order, said that three Twitter users never worked for the site but that two helped make public a video that showed a 2007 US helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed several people.
The site has since angered US authorities by posting secret documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and releasing a slew of internal correspondence among US diplomats around the world.