This seems fine to me. It's a public tweet so the government could have easily captured a copy initially. Asking Twitter to produce the message with a court order seems better than the government having their own database of public tweets.<p>I see a few other problems.<p>The first is wasting so much money on prosecuting someone who was walking on the street instead of sidewalk. Yes, they blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. But there is the Manhattan Bridge, Queensboro Bridge, Midtown Tunnel, and many other alternate routes from Manhattan to Long Island. The net impact was probably nothing. The sidewalk on the Brooklyn Bridge is woefully inadequate for everything anyway so I don't really blame them for using the road. Better to block cars that can divert at 60mph than bikes that have to divert at 3mph :)<p>The second issue I see is with the prosecution proving that a chain of custody was maintained for the messages that Twitter produced. If any Twitter employee has write access to the data store, the messages and timestamps could easily have been altered. How can the prosecution prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this did not happen?<p>Finally, how can one prove a tweet conveyed actual intent rather than mere interest? I often tweet about things like, "I should go get 5000 of my closest friends to block the Brooklyn Bridge." If I did that on the day of the protest, that would look bad for me. But I might have been posturing rather than organizing, which is my right to do without interference from the government.<p>Anyway, this is all a huge waste. It seems like New York City is being pressured to keep working on this bullshit case when they should have just cleared the bridge, issued fines, and moved on. Or maybe, you know, provide adequate pedestrian capacity so people can peaceably assemble without having to block traffic!<p>(Incidentally, the exact lane that the protesters blocked is closed every night for construction...)
I don't understand the ruling. Sure, my tweet is public, but why does that mean that the government can demand my email address and other identifying user information?<p>I'm also confused as to what's even being demanded. If the tweets are public, doesn't the Manhattan DA already have them? And if they know who this person is (since they said his name, Malcom Harris), what identifying user information do they actually need?
Legal merits aside, that the judge would invoke the founding fathers as he assists in the corporate-governmental squashing of civil disobedience and dissent is pretty damn hypocritical/ignorant. 90% of the founding fathers would likely be strong supporters of, if not there on the front lines of Occupy Wall Street and similar protests if they were alive today. The US government in its present state stands directly (and proudly) against their most strongly held and stated values.
As crappy as this is - it seems to be legal and logical. You don't get to claim privacy on something you're broadcasting to the world, and neither does the company, considering they asked LoC to permanently archive a chunk.
Twitter won. They've stood up for their users in court and got a lot of public support for doing so. The verdict is disappointing but doesn't really affect that.<p>The users involved, and others down the line, are the ones who effectively lost this case.
>The judge also turned Twitter’s own policies and businesses decisions against the company as rationale for upholding the subpoena, pointing out that Twitter in 2010 signed an agreement to allow the Library of Congress to keep an archive of all public tweets ever made on the service, using the information sharing as an example that Twitter itself didn’t consider the content private.<p>Does this mean the government sued twitter to get information they could have simply looked up at the library?<p>The judge is missing that no one is entitled to put an administrative burden on twitter, especially for information they can get off the internet anyway... Archive.org much?
This makes a great case for an anonymous, P2P-based clone of twitter.<p>Plus, having the intelligence in the client would allow a nice variety of client tailored to different people's needs.
So what if I post a message on Facebook and share it only with my immediate friends. Does that also classify as public? What if I share it with only one person?
If you post on social networks or micro blogs your posting information into the public domain. You are therefore responsible for what you say and this can be used for/against you. I see no difference between a twitter, a spoken recording or a written statement.<p>Either way it is nice to see twitter did fight this to some extent
Franzen (the linked article) discusses the justification for surrendering the user's public tweets but not the user's private information. Judge Sciarrino's decision distinguishes between these tweets and the user's "non-content" private information, finding that "The law governing compelled disclosure also covers the above mentioned non-content records." This law is 18 USC 2730[c][1][B], which is fairly straightforward.<p><a href="http://law.onecle.com/uscode/18/2703.html" rel="nofollow">http://law.onecle.com/uscode/18/2703.html</a><p>In short, this is no big deal. The information was legally subpoenaed in connection with a criminal investigation. I think this is only on the front page because it has the words "Twitter", "Occupy", and "Forced" in the title.