Couple interesting "@Snowden" related articles. Sockpuppets was his baby.
http:// www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-03/52ceefe277e4f13f4300001d.html
https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
>theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.
http:// contributoria.com/issue/2014-03/52ceefe277e4f13f4300001d.html
In answer to this question, Wexler sent me a link to a statement [6] on Twitter’s blog by Jeremy Kessel (@jer), the company’s manager of global legal policy. Kessel writes, “For the disclosure of national security requests to be meaningful to our users, it must be within a range that provides sufficient precision to be meaningful.”What does this response mean? Twitter is unable to take countermeasures against sock puppets because…the US government forces them to allow such activity?
In 2013, after Edward Snowden came forward, and Lavabit subsequently shut down, security expert Bruce Schneier had this to say:“If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business,” he wrote.