Twitter hands over messages at heart of Occupy case

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19597437

by anons2011 • 14 years ago

61 36 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

accarrino• 14 years ago

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

eblume• 14 years ago

Contempt of court is contempt of court - I see Twitter waiting until the last day as a philosophical stand while their hands were otherwise tied. I don't fault them here.

jph2• 14 years ago

Twitter is still supporting the users; Twitter waited until the last possible day to turn in the records and in addition has protected the tweets from being used until after an appeal process.

danboarder• 14 years ago

No; Twitter originally argued that privacy laws were being violated by this request. They should have stuck to this position and contested any contempt fines. Someone has to be willing to get involved and challenge this if privacy law is indeed being violated by the district attorney or other parties in these cases.

cypherpunks01• 14 years ago

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

OzzyB2• 14 years ago

> If the messages were not handed over on 14 September, Twitter would have been in contempt of court and faced substantial fines.

So pay the fines, take a stand.

You have $1billion dollars right? Put it to some good use.

luu2• 14 years ago

That's a game that twitter can't win. The fines will keep escalating until twitter folds. What does it cost the judge to keep doubling the fine until it eats up $1B? Maybe five cents of ink each time. What does it cost twitter? $1B.

OzzyB2• 14 years ago

They could win in the court of public opinion if they yell loud enough. This is politics nothing else.

Could you imagine the headlines/press if the judge levies a fine of even $100mil+?

Here are some for fun:

"Twitter forced to consider termination of 300 employees after partisan Judge <name> levies $300million fine because of Twitter's refusal to destroy the public's trust."

"Twitter CEO <name> asks the Obama Administration why, in light of severe employment and a depressed economy, it's willing to force a shinning example of American innovation and job growth into bankruptcy. The Romney camp responds by accusing President Obama of flip-flopping on his campaign stance of being 'for a free and open internet'"

... and so on and so forth.

jph2• 14 years ago

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).

Read about the Digital Due Process alliance here, including Twitter: http://digitaldueprocess.org/

"An alliance of tech companies including Twitter, Google, Amazon.com, Apple, AT&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. "

sneak2• 14 years ago

These huge companies (I'm looking at you, Google) can choose to operate (or not) under the draconian jurisdiction of the USA, where the PATRIOT Act's NSLs have completely evaporated due process at the federal level.

It's been in place for over a decade now. It's not going anywhere. Yet these companies are still installing new servers within the borders.

At which point does the blame shift from the lawmakers to the complicit? Is the ten years between October 2001 (PATRIOT) and October 2011 sufficient? If not, then what is?

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

What country's jurisdiction do you recommend they move to?

brown9-25• 14 years ago

How do you expect them to do business in the US or have employees in the US while avoiding the PATRIOT Act? What is Google or Twitter realistically to do here - shut down business in the largest market and highest-skilled workforce in the world?

edit: Also, it seems to me like your argument could be extended from the companies that provide services in such a jurisdiction to the people that use such a service in such a jurisdiction. At what point do we blame Twitter users for an (unrealistic) expectation that their data will never be turned over to authorities?

cube13• 14 years ago

What change to due process would you recommend in this case?

The prosecution, as is their right, asked the judge to issue a subpoena to Twitter for the information. The judge agreed, and issued it.

I don't see how due process was not followed at all. If this was a civil case, nobody would have batted an eye at Twitter releasing the information to the plantiff or defendant.

EDIT: I'm not sure that the digital due process changes, if they were enacted exactly as the group suggests, would have changed this outcome.

All that Google, et al, are asking for is clarification to the rules and standards. That would not have stopped a prosecutor from requesting the subpoena, nor would it have stopped the judge from granting it.

Autious• 14 years ago

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)

But, is there some law or other reason that Twitter would continue to store tweets that have been removed by its users?

elarkin• 14 years ago

There very well may be a legal requirement. There is with email. If I understand right, a company must retain all communication for something crazy like 3 years.

motoford• 14 years ago

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.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Here's a PDF of the June ruling which discusses the legal issues: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/owsharristwitterdec63012.pd...

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.

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.

gavinlynch2• 14 years ago

That seems utterly logical and practical. Thanks for your take and the link.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Yes, but if something was briefly posted by mistake, not archived, and retracted, I think people have a right to keep it private.

ThaddeusQuay2• 14 years ago

"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."

I believe this to be true, although without regard for the details of this case, because I look at it from the point of view of censorship. When taken to the extreme, in a world where there is no censorship of any kind, a person cannot even censor themselves, given that nothing ever made public could be permanently deleted.

brown9-25• 14 years ago

The ruling is very interesting, thanks for posting.

It seems the main issue is whether the defendant has the right to sue to intervene when Twitter is subpoenaed to turn his information over to third party (the People). That is a bit different than the way most of the media coverage is framing the issue.

malandrew• 14 years ago

What I find frightening though is that the notion of public isn't black and white. I can totally see a judge considering something posted online only to your friends to be public. How public does something have to be to be considered public? Visible to a few friends? All your friends? Friends and co-workers? I imagine that the nuance of privacy controls would be lost and anything visible by parties besides those the posting was intended for could be considered public. For example, if I post a message to my timeline for all my Facebook contacts to see, but I really only intended to be for my family, then is that to be considered public since I didn't go through the trouble of shielding that post from anyone but my family?

brown9-25• 14 years ago

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.

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.

There is a legal process and like it or not, companies have to abide by it.

mtgx• 14 years ago

From what I've seen many think the judge is in the wrong to not even allow them to appeal. Why wouldn't the judge allow them to appeal? Makes no sense.

http://gigaom.com/2012/09/12/the-facebook-addicted-judge-and...

tptacek• 14 years ago

Huh? How does a judge "not allow someone to appeal"?

Twitter and the NYCLU are alleging that by holding Twitter in contempt for not honoring a court order, the judge is effectively infringing on their right to appeal. That's a sane argument, but it isn't the same thing as "not allowing them to appeal". Moreover, if there was a clear and urgent grounds for appeal, the appeals court could expedite the challenge. They haven't.

brown9-25• 14 years ago

This is a tangent but that article makes some weird arguments. What is the relevance that the judge is or was a "Facebook addict" to this case? Who cares that he used MySpace? It just seems like the author is attempting to make the judge look incompetent (which his use of hashtags in the ruling already has accomplished).

j_s• 14 years ago

> There is only so far they can go in fighting a court order.

And for Twitter the line is drawn where cost switches from salaried company lawyer's time to real money directly toward the fight. Lipservice is cheap.

quaunaut• 14 years ago

Look, I'm no fan of Twitter(their practices lately have put me in a position of really hating the company), but this was an obvious case of "If we did bring it to court, we'd lose in a heartbeat." There's no reason to go further when you know you've already lost.

guelo• 14 years ago

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.

Twitter hands over messages at heart of Occupy case

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