In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a subpoena seeking Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s Twitter information dating back to November 2009. Jónsdóttir was an Icelandic member of parliament who had worked with WikiLeaks and helped produce the 2010 “Collateral Murder” video. The request raised concerns because it sought a foreign legislator’s private communications and account records in connection with a U.S. investigation, while the existence and scope of related orders to other internet providers were not initially disclosed to her.
Jónsdóttir petitioned a federal appeals court in Virginia to force the Justice Department to reveal which other providers had been ordered to surrender her data. The Inter-Parliamentary Union issued a resolution expressing deep concern that a state had sought communications information belonging to another country’s parliamentarian and warning of consequences for lawmakers’ ability to perform their mandates freely. The episode became a significant privacy and parliamentary-immunity controversy, although the supplied source does not report a final ruling requiring disclosure or establish that the government unlawfully accessed the records.
