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The US Department of Justice has served Twitter with a 2703(d) court order to reveal information about accounts related to people associated with WikiLeaks.

The order is a request for account data including the ominous "correspondence and notes of record related to the account" for users Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Rop Gongrijp (@rop_g), Birgitta Jonsittir (@birgittaj); Julian Assange and Bradley Manning from November 1, 2009 to present.

Salon is reporting that the original (sealed) order was signed on December 14th by Judge Theresa Buchanan in Alexandria, Va. It gave Twitter 3 days to comply with the DOJ without notifying anyone involved. Then mysteriously, and possibly because a gag order on a 2703 (d) might be unconstitutional, Buchanan decided this Wednesday to unseal the document at Twitter's request.

Cnet political corespondent Declan McCullagh tells TechCrunch that this is highly unusual, "So the judge — remember, a magistrate judge, not a district judge — got nervous and backed down and coughed up this week's order. You rarely see judges reverse themselves so thoroughly."

The WikiLeaks Twitter account has also mentioned Google and Facebook as other possible recipients of data requests. I have contacted both companies for more information and have yet to hear back.

Court order and unsealing notice, below.

Want to read the court order? Here it is: http://www.salon.com...er/subpoena.pdf

TechCrunch has the article HERE!