A Suffolk Superior Court judge has sided with Boston cops in their bid to hunt down Anonymous hackers after incidents of Web sabotage that included shutting down the department’s website and releasing police officers’ email addresses and passwords.

The order, signed Tuesday, ends weeks of legal wrangling between the American Civil Liberties Union and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley’s office, which said Twitter handed over the data in question yesterday. The subpoena ordered Twitter to surrender IP addresses of three users — identified only as “Guido Fawkes,” “@p0isAn0N,” and “@OccupyBoston” — as well as anyone who used the “#BostonPD” hashtag on Twitter between Dec. 8-13. Conley spokesman Jake Wark said prosecutors spoke with Twitter to more narrowly focus the requested data.

“We are not interested in the information of a large number of people who have used those hashtags. This is an investigation into a specific criminal act, and not a political investigation,” Wark said. “Once we had some meaningful dialogue with Twitter, a very clear understanding of what was requested was ironed out and that narrowed the field of information that was provided today.”

But the ACLU said the judge’s decision amounts to a violation of free speech.

“For the commonwealth to seek information about a conversation, not just a specific person, is alarming and again shows the problems with the state’s administrative subpoena statute,” ACLU spokesman Chris Ott said. ACLU lawyer Peter Krupp said Twitter users have a right to speak anonymously against the state without fear of retaliation, saying the subpoena “infringed on our clients’ rights under the First Amendment.”

Prosecutors will not say specifically what crime is being investigated, only that it has nothing to do with the Occupy Boston encampment. The subpoena was issued days after the Web attacks that were claimed by Anonymous.

source:http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20220302twitter_surrenders_data_in_hack_probe/