"Facebook, Google, Twitter: Put them all together. If they're all working together, their ability to manipulate us, to know [about us], this is absolutely antithetical to democracy," he said. "People in this audience have the ability to decide that they are ready to take a risk in their lives to fight to preserve democracy in this country and to preserve us from total transparency to our executive branch."

On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation , from companies such as Facebook and MySpace, used to explain to law enforcement how it should go about requesting sensitive information from those websites. The guidebooks "show that social-networking sites have struggled to develop consistent, straightforward policies to govern how and when they will provide private user information to law enforcement agencies," the EFF said.

The issue came up recently when Twitter fought a gag order that prohibited the company from telling users associated with Wikileaks that their Twitter messages had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Department of Justice. The gag orders are typically used to keep criminals from knowing that they are under investigation, but in the case of Wikileaks, Twitter's lawyers fought the order and won -- allowing the.

Facebook won't say whether it has had similar requests, but in an e-mail message Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes shed some light on Facebook's approach. "We are required to regularly push back against over-broad requests for user records. ... [I]n most cases we are able to convince the party issuing legal process to withdraw the overbroad request, but if they do not we fight the matter in court (and have a history of success in those cases)."

Facebook has been hit with a "growing volume of third party data requests," he said. The company isn't saying exactly how many requests it's received, or how fast the number has been growing, but it's thinking of publishing some data on this in the future.