Information Government and Courts request from websites?

For long, telephone call records and more recently location details have been used in investigations conducted by law. In cases of defamation, online criminal activity, hacktivism and promotion of abusive and offensive content similar evidence on web activity is needed. Courts and Law enforcement agencies would like to gather forensic report on the suspects online activity for their investigations from ISPs, social networking sites and e-mail providers, such as Facebook and Google.

Very recently a US court requested information from Twitter which provides us a good description of what may be a boilerplate for future requests to websites and coming regulation. Records requested were:

1. The customer’s full contact details (phone numbers and addresses)
2. Account payment method if any (credit card and bank account number)
3. IP addresses used to access the account, connection records (“records of session times and durations”) and data transfer information, such as the size of data file sent to someone else and the destination IP

 In the near future, we are sure to see regulation in this area which would mandate the storage of records by websites.