Twitter Wins Order for GitHub to Share Code-Leak Culprit Data

Malathi Nayak, Bloomberg News

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. Stock markets are still not entirely sold on Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc. after the billionaire revived the deal at its original price earlier this week. , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Twitter Inc. moved closer to finding the individual responsible for leaking parts of its proprietary source code after a California federal court granted its request to subpoena GitHub, the social media site where the information was posted.

GitHub must provide personal identifying information associated with the account FreeSpeechEnthusiast by April 3, according to the order signed by a court clerk on Tuesday. Github didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The proprietary code is at the heart of Twitter’s platform and internal tools. Musk had promised last month to make Twitter’s algorithm publicly available, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The FreeSpeechEnthusiast username chosen by the Twitter leaker appears to be a taunt at Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who promised to bring freedom of expression to the platform when he took over the company late last year.

The case is In re: DMCA Section 512(b) Subpoena to Github Inc., 3:23-mc-80090, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco)