The United States justice authorities are demanding the Twitter account details of people suspected of having links to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Dutch internet activist Rop Gonggrijp is on the list but, on his blog, he says the US won’t learn much from the information.

“I don’t use Twitter much and I’ve never received or sent a Direct Message via Twitter. What Twitter’s got on me isn’t very spectacular.” His account only has 84 public tweets.

Rop Gonggrijp is well known as a hacker and internet activist in the Netherlands and abroad. The US authorities have issued a court order for information including his tweets, Direct Messages, his IP numbers and credit card details.

Mr Gonggrijp made an announcement on his blog about the court order this weekend soon after being informed of it by Twitter’s lawyers.

Baghdad video
It is not certain why the US authorities have suddenly become interested in Mr Gonggrijp, though he speculates on his blog that it may have something to do with his work on the WikiLeaks publication of the ‘Collateral Murder‘ video (warning: graphic footage). The video shows US soldiers in Baghdad firing from a helicopter on a group of civilians. Two Reuters journalists and two children were killed in the incident.

Rop Gonggrijp has made no secret of his involvement with the video, but says his association with WikiLeaks ended when that work finished. He did, however, work on press legislation for Iceland with Julian Assange. The draft, which was designed to protect journalists, has since been voted into law.

Way back
Gonggrijp and Assange knew each other before the publication of the headline-grabbing video. At a recent meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, a group of hackers and techies in Berlin, Gonggrijp told about a trip to Kuala Lumpur for a hacker festival, Hack in the Box, in 2009. 

After the event, Gonggrijp and Assange travelled together through Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia. In Gonggrijp's words: “Then we really got to know each other.” The trip dated back to the time before WikiLeaks was well-known to the public.

Openness 
Gonggrijp is not underestimating the seriousness of the US judicial investigation:

"Being involved in a criminal investigation, and especially one which is likely to have huge political pressure behind it, is a very serious matter. So I am talking to lawyers, trying to better understand what is going on and I am weighing my options."

While Twitter has been lauded for its handling of Washington's request, Gonggrijp has his doubts about Google and Facebook. Have they received a similar request for information and secretly acceded? A tweet about the degree of privacy on the internet this weekend in any case speaks volumes:

“For all these people that were asking: this kind of thing is why people run their own mail servers. Get it now?”