Twitter hands over messages at heart of Occupy case

It seems to me that Twitter has upheld the user's privacy as best they could. There is only so far they can go in fighting a court order.<p>Disregard for privacy would have the company turning the data in question over to authorities whenever they asked, without so much as a subpoena or court order. That doesn't sound like what has happened here.<p>There is a legal process and like it or not, companies have to abide by it.

Twitter is consistently working for legal user privacy, even in the face of this U.S. setback. (I'm not affiliated with Twitter, I just follow them).<p>Read about the Digital Due Process alliance here, including Twitter: <a href="http://digitaldueprocess.org/" rel="nofollow">http://digitaldueprocess.org/</a><p>"An alliance of tech companies including Twitter, Google, Amazon.com, Apple, AT&#38;T, Facebook along with nonprofit groups called the Digital Due Process Coalition has been pressing the U.S. Congress to update federal privacy law to reflect today's cloud computing era, but has enjoyed only limited success so far. "

Here's a PDF of the June ruling which discusses the legal issues: <a href="http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/owsharristwitterdec63012.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/owsharristwitterdec63012.pd...</a><p>It's a fairly easy read and is interesting. There are a number of issues at stake, primarily who has standing to quash the subpoena and should a warrant be required.<p>Looking at this solely as a geek and not taking into account the legal issues, any information that has been publicly available on the net at any point should be considered permanently public. If you don't want something to be public don't post it publicly.

<i>&#62; If the messages were not handed over on 14 September, Twitter would have been in contempt of court and faced substantial fines. </i><p>So pay the fines, take a stand.<p>You have $1billion dollars right? Put it to some good use.

Here's an account of the incident, written by defendant Malcolm Harris in October 2011: <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-bridge-to-somewhere/" rel="nofollow">http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-bridge-to-somewhere/</a>

Twitter wants this both ways, they say it's the users' data when requested to turn it over, but they say it's their data when a user wants to use a 3rd party client to access it.

The state's hunger for information about all of us is really something that ought to give us pause as we continue to move more of our lives online. Things that were impossible for the state to know in the past, such as our location and our thoughts at specific points in time, are now claimed to be indispensable to them.

It sounds like the user had removed the tweets from his account to hide them from public viewing. (I might be wrong here, not the point)<p>But, is there some law or other reason that Twitter would continue to store tweets that have been removed by its users?

this is unfortunate, especially since Ben Lee, Twitter's legal counsel, took a stand supporting users earlier this week. <a href="http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/09/twitter-users-rights-for-now/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/09/twitter-users-rights-for-no...</a>