Twitter Must Hand Over Tweets of OWS Protester

[exfileme]

Twitter is ordered to hand over tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor, or face a substantial fine.

Twitter Must Hand Over Tweets of OWS Protester : Read more

 

[devotiecon]

As an incentive to get what he needs, the judge also told Twitter's lawyers that the social website must disclose sensitive financial information so that he could determine the exact amount of the fine if Twitter didn't comply.

I lol'd.

 

[blazorthon]

If twitter was so worried about this issue, then they should have made it impossible to recover the deleted tweets before they were in trouble with the law over this. I'm not justifying either side of this, just saying that it could have more or less solved this.

 

[cheepstuff]

Harris was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct along with around 700 other protestors accused of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2012

... does anybody see a problem here?
Maybe I'm just crazy.

 

[cheepstuff]

Harris was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct along with around 700 other protestors accused of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2012

... does anybody see a problem here?
Maybe I'm just crazy.

 

[thefizzle656]

"Harris was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct along with around 700 other protestors accused of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2012."

More important than anything else in this article is the fact that the OWS protestors (as well as the court) apparently have a time machine. Or maybe this is like The Minority Report and the suspect is being convicted of a crime he has yet to commit.

 

[thefizzle656]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]If twitter was so worried about this issue, then they should have made it impossible to recover the deleted tweets before they were in trouble with the law over this. I'm not justifying either side of this, just saying that it could have more or less solved this.[/citation]

The issue I have is that they even keep deleted tweets. But I guess with Google an other tech companies doing the exact same with with all of our emails, etc there is no real incentive for Twitter to do any different.

 

[groveborn]

It's not a simple matter to instantly delete a post. There are millions of such request per day. It has to be queued in order to prevent utter chaos and crashing.

 

[sun-devil99]

Harris was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct along with around 700 other protestors accused of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2012.

So then does that mean it is not really September 2012 and the Mayan's were wrong?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]groveborn[/nom]It's not a simple matter to instantly delete a post. There are millions of such request per day. It has to be queued in order to prevent utter chaos and crashing.[/citation]

That doesn't matter. The posts were already deleted. If Twitter's deletion methods actually deleted the posts rather than hiding them somewhere, then this would probably not be an issue or at least be less of an issue.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]sun-devil99[/nom]So then does that mean it is not really September 2012 and the Mayan's were wrong?[/citation]

The Mayan's long count calender doesn't have leap days. If you account for this discrepancy, it ended several years ago. Besides, the Mayans never said that the world would end at the end of their calender, that was a load of BS.

 

[lysinger]

I guess we will soon find out if all the nothings we tweet all day long are being recorded somewhere. My bet is they are along with all those kiosk scans of our bodies at the Airport security checkpoints.

Love the typo on the date. Spell check is wonderful, but I've noticed entirely too many typos similar to this in books the past 10 years. I bet the author of that article has a college degree too.

 

[blazorthon]

I guess we will soon find out if all the nothings we tweet all day long are being recorded somewhere. My bet is they are along with all those kiosk scans of our bodies at the Airport security checkpoints.

Love the typo on the date. Spell check is wonderful, but I've noticed entirely too many typos similar to this in books the past 10 years. I bet the author of that article has a college degree too.

It wouldn't be a Tom's article if it didn't have any typos

 

[freggo]

[citation][nom]cheepstuff[/nom]... does anybody see a problem here?Maybe I'm just crazy.[/citation]

Yes, a BIG problem.
This is yet another example that 'delete' is not 'gone forever' when it comes to the digital age.

All these folks out there thinking that cleaning out the Trashcan removes something from a hard drive or memory chip; think again.

I think there is a huge difference between a court being able to subpoena something that is 'active' on your account vs something you deleted.

 

[southernshark]

People should never start a social network in the USA.

Realistically, if Twitter were say.... a Guatemalan corporation... nothing would happen here. They could flick the judge the bird and laugh about it.

No tech company should be located in the USA.

 

[sykozis]

The problem I see, is that the court is trying to make an example of Harris by any means necessary..... Just my opinion here....but I smell corruption...

 

[nightbird321]

It's not a surprise that Public Domain messages are fair game in court, however I hope private companies aren't expected to keep public domain stuff forever and in cases of deletion will be paid fair fees like any other forensic specialists would be to recover information.

Twitter is in a tough spot because they can't claim unreasonable costs as a reason to frequently delete things permanently, by design years worth of short text messages can probably be stored in a thumb drive. However companies that host pictures and videos are a different story so I'd be interest in what happens if a court asks Google to recover a permanently deleted video.

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]The Mayan's long count calender doesn't have leap days. If you account for this discrepancy, it ended several years ago. Besides, the Mayans never said that the world would end at the end of their calender, that was a load of BS.[/citation]
Actually the current Bak'tun of the Mayan calendar will end on 21st December of 2012. The Mayan calendar, is based on the number of days as passed since the beginning of the calendar. There is no certainty about the exact date of this beginning but most commonly accepted date is 11 of August of 3113 BCE on the Gregorian calendar. A Bak'tun is equivalent to 144,000 days, so when the 13th Bak'tun begins, 1,872,000 days have passed since the calendar's beginning. If you add this amount of days to the calendar's beginning you get 21st of December of 2012. I'm not implying that the world is going to end or anything. A Bak'tun is almost 400 years, and since the world survived 12 other Bak'tun changes I infer it's going to survive this one.

Also Another mistake is that the Mayan calendar is going to end, but it isn't. After the Mayan year (Tun), we have the Ka'tun (20 Tun) and the Bak'tun (20 Ka'tun). Each Mayan calendar unit represents 20 units of the one that came before (with the exception of the Tun that is 18 Uinal and the Kin that it's the smallest unit of the calendar and represents a day). After the we hare still three more other units. The calendar will eventually end at the 20th Alautun. If there's a cataclysm associated with it, one this is certain, none of us will be there to see it since it's 1262460634 years from now.

 

[Cazalan]

If you stifle peaceful protest you only increase the chance of violent protest.

 

[Guest]

wayback machine
duh

 

[john_4]

And people wonder why there is such a movement to move all our stuff to the cloud.

 

[randomizer]

As an incentive to get what he needs, the judge also told Twitter's lawyers that the social website must disclose sensitive financial information so that he could determine the exact amount of the fine if Twitter didn't comply.

And if they choose not to disclose this information...? I guess he'll just have to pick a number between 1 and 10M.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]randomizer[/nom]And if they choose not to disclose this information...? I guess he'll just have to pick a number between 1 and 10M.[/citation]

That works well with your user name

 

[jabliese]

There are now laws on the book that require companies to keep e-mails archived basically forever. Not sure if tweets are covered specifically in that law or not, but if Twitter did permanently delete tweets when the user deleted them from their account, they could quite easily run afoul of that law.

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]jabliese[/nom]There are now laws on the book that require companies to keep e-mails archived basically forever. Not sure if tweets are covered specifically in that law or not, but if Twitter did permanently delete tweets when the user deleted them from their account, they could quite easily run afoul of that law.[/citation]

I will call your bullshit for what it is. Go put your tinfoil hat back on.

There is no such law mandating corporations archive emails, only individual people and only if they are under subpoena. I am constantly setting users emails to permanent archive due to ongoing litigation, but the cost's associated with a permanent archive on an enterprise level are astounding. Not only in setting up such an archive but the power and hardware requirements, backup media, and secure storage to keep hundreds of terabytes of sensitive data.

Data management is more important than ever, but if you store data you are liable to provide it when asked by a court. The only solution to this is to setup policies to permanently delete user data that is not needed. When a court asks for previous emails from any of my users, I am unable to help them because we don't keep it for more than 30 days, and it takes more than 30 days for a court to ask for anything.

Internet companies in general need to take a page from the pirate bay's book and make users responsible for their own data. The users would be safer, and the corporation would not be liable.