US drops effort to unmask Twitter account

[struggle4progress]

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
Friday 7 April 2017 17.16 EDT
First published on Friday 7 April 2017 14.46 EDT

The US government has backed down from its attempt to unmask an anonymous Twitter account that criticized the Trump administration ...

... one day after Twitter sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to block its effort to gain identifying information about an anonymous account, @ALT_USCIS, attorneys from the justice department contacted Twitter to inform them that the .. summons had been withdrawn ...

“Speaking anonymously about issues of the day is a longstanding American tradition, dating back to when the framers of the constitution wrote under pseudonyms,” the ACLU attorney Esha Bhandari said in a statement. “The anonymity that the first amendment guarantees is often most essential when people criticize the government, and this free speech right is as important today as ever” ...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/twitter-trump-lawsuit-anonymous-account-dropped

[spanone]

1. so, in the middle of all this bullshit on unmasking, they were suing to unmask a u.s. citizen

these people are unbelievable

[babylonsister]

2. Curses, they're foiled again! YES! nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Better headline: ACLU wins lawsuit in 24 hours, Trump backs down. n/t