Edit: for those saying "good PR", why doesn't that apply to Amazon, Paypal, or any of the other companies that refused to work with Wikileaks? Is Twitter in a more precarious position in its market than they are in theirs? I don't think so, because even if you can replicate Twitter's software, you can't clone their community.
1) They have principles. I know the GC personally and he is a very principled guy. So are ev and biz.
2) Having principles isn't counter to the ability to recognize gains. In fact, the idealist in me hopes and has seen how they are intimately connected.
Also, remember that if you start giving into every request like this without a fight, they'll end up looking like a patsy. They fight and they know that they'll be taken seriously by law enforcement and by their users. I'm glad twitter did this.
Much of it is likely attributable to Twitter’s general counsel Alexander Macgillivray. As security and privacy blogger Christopher Soghoian notes, Macgillivray was one of the first law students at Harvards’ Berkman internet law center and at in his previous job at Google “played a major role in getting the company to contribute takedown requests to chillingeffects.org.”
I know we're talking about totally different scales here, but web users are able to be very, very fickle. Look at something like digg. In what seemed like a few days, the site all but completely lost all relevancy because the users' perception of "management" was that they were catering to advertisers.
Twitter could fall just as quickly (and so could facebook, despite what seems to be popular opinion) if the users start feeling like they have to be cautious about what they're tweeting (or who they're following, in this case).
That would be my guess. Whatever the reason, I do hope that more companies consider following Twitter and defending their users in the future.
What does Twitter have to offer, really? Do we really care about Paris offering links to her friend's vagina? I mean, that, "Shit my dad says" and so on are entertaining and maybe worth a little bit but Twitter's real value is as a news service. If you're following the right place you can get instant news in a way not possible almost anywhere else. Would we have even heard about the Iran riots without Twitter? If they're going to be the place for scoops for the world they can't show themselves as someone who will give you up the first time the US asks.