US court forces GitHub to reveal Twitter's source code leaker

Twitter has obtained a subpoena forcing GitHub to reveal the user allegedly responsible for posting “variable excerpts” of leaked Twitter source code on the GitHub community site.

According to Twitter's March 24 filing in the Northern California US district court, "various excerpts" of the company's source code were posted on GitHub, a community software developer code-sharing platform owned by Microsoft.

The court documents, as seen by Reuters, singled out GitHub user “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” as the guilty party.

Now, a court clerk has signed off on a subpoena, which gives GitHub until April 3 to expose more info about the user known as FreeSpeechEnthusiast.

The subpoena “commands” GitHub to produce “all identifying information, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), social media profile data, and IP address(es), associated with FreeSpeechEnthusiast.

The information will also have to include all “ identifying information provided when this account was established, as well as all identifying information provided subsequently for billing or administrative purposes.”

The subpoena also covers a user or users who “posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified” any data on the page's URL.

GitHub said it took down the code Friday, the same day as the filing, at Twitter's request.

The page where the source code once lived now states, “Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown," along with a detailed explanation.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed by the US congress in 1998 to legally address infringement of copyrighted digital works.

It is not known how long Twitter's source code had been publicly available on the sharing site.

Revealing a platform’s source code opens the site to significant security threats and possible theft of intellectual property.

Elon Musk, who bought the company last October for $44 billion and is quite active on Twitter, has not publicly commented on the leak.

Musk has made his own headlines in the past months over mass Twitter layoffs, random firings of entire Twitter departments, and even complaining about the company's value being down more than $20 billion since taking over.

Musk had also promised to open the platform’s software for developers after accusations of tweaking the code to make his tweets more prominent but has not followed through on the pledge so far.

There have been rumors among Twitter users that the source-code leak was retribution from one of Twitter's disgruntled ex-employees.