Musk said on March 17 that Twitter will make “all code used to recommend tweets” open source by March 31, but the leaked code may be much more sensitive. The NYT said its sources indicate that Twitter executives are concerned “that the code includes security vulnerabilities that could give hackers or other motivated parties the means to extract user data or take down the site.”
Twitter sent the takedown notice on Friday and asked a federal court to issue a subpoena later the same day. “The DMCA Subpoena is directed to service provider GitHub,” Twitter’s request for a subpoena said. “GitHub operates a website to which the infringing party or parties (identified by their GitHub username as FreeSpeechEnthusiast) posted various excerpts of Twitter source code, which posting infringes copyrights held by Twitter in those materials.”
Twitter seeks “all identifying information”
Twitter’s proposed subpoena seeks “all identifying information, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), social media profile data, and IP address(es), for the user(s) associated with the following GitHub username: FreeSpeechEnthusiast.” It also asks for “all identifying information provided when this account was established, as well as all identifying information provided subsequently for billing or administrative purposes.”
The subpoena request further seeks all identifying information for any “users who posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified the data” at the repository where the Twitter source code was posted.
When contacted by Ars, GitHub did not comment on Twitter’s request for the user’s identifying information or the attempt to obtain a subpoena. “GitHub does not generally comment on decisions to remove content. However, in the interest of transparency, we share every DMCA takedown request publicly,” a GitHub spokesperson said. The Twitter DMCA takedown notice was posted by GitHub here.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Another Twitter court filing contains the email thread between Twitter and GitHub that led to the takedown on Friday. It appears that GitHub disabled the repository less than an hour and a half after Twitter filed the takedown notice.