Twitter Must Hand Over Tweets of OWS Protester
Twitter is ordered to hand over tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protestor, or face a substantial fine.
The New York Post reports that Twitter has been ordered by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Sciarrino Jr. to hand over possibly incriminating tweets posted by an Occupy Wall Street protestor.
According to reports, Twitter, citing privacy concerns and other issues, fought with the District Attorney's office for months in regards to handing over deleted tweets posted by protestor Malcolm Harris. Twitter even filed an appeal against a subpoena to provide them in a criminal case, but the appeals judges ruled that the defense could not delay the criminal case. Thus Judge Sciarrino told the social network that it had until Friday to cooperate, or face a fine for contempt of court.
"They don’t want to go in contempt," said Martin Stolar, Harris' lawyer.
Harris was reportedly charged with disorderly conduct along with around 700 other protestors accused of blocking the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011. The tweets in question are no longer available online, but prosecutors claim that those specific tweets reveal that Harris knew that police informed the group that they could not walk on the roadway.
The OWS protestors naturally claim otherwise however, stating that the police intentionally corralled them onto the bridge so that they could be arrested for trespassing. Harris claims that he has done nothing wrong and continues to fight the court, yet many of those that were arrested have taken no-jail pleas, reluctant to battle the court system.
Because the judge can't put the "little blue bird in jail" for contempt of court, he said there would be a substantial fine if the tweets weren't in his hands by Friday. 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.
The court system generally believes that posts published on Twitter are public domain, therefore users have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Typically Twitter complies with orders for account information and messages, but didn't immediately comply in this particular case because, according to sources close to the matter, the prosecutors immediately approached Twitter with threats of criminal contempt charges.
"It was a bit of a slap in the face," according to an unnamed source.
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.
... does anybody see a problem here?
Maybe I'm just crazy.
I lol'd.
... does anybody see a problem here?
Maybe I'm just crazy.
... does anybody see a problem here?
Maybe I'm just crazy.
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.
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.
So then does that mean it is not really September 2012 and the Mayan's were wrong?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
duh