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Comment by sacrosanct | Hacker News Reader

Needs more context. I glossed over the PDF, but couldn't figure out what this is about. ELI5.

https://daringfireball.net/2023/08/holy_hell_trump_did_use_d... I think covers this well.

That's an extremely partisan source...

The DOJ asked for access to Trump's twitter account, including DMs, deleted items, and drafts. Twitter stalled on producing this information so this hearing was the DOJ asking the judge to start hitting Twitter with fines until they could produce.

There's also some confusion at the start because DOJ asked for other possible accounts that Trump might have used as a sockpuppet/backchannel means of communication and Twitter seems to either not be able to discover that, or can't find it.

> Twitter seems to either not be able to discover that, or can't find it

They clearly CAN, but don't want to. Their (X's lawyers) objections in the transcript are ridiculous (they claimed they don't have an "affiliated account" category - like really?!?) and when pressed for timeframes suddenly they can produce "impossible" data in less than 24h.

Was Twitter really as sophisticated as Facebook in this regard?

If @realdonaldtrump and @johnbarron are both tweeting from the same IP in the same time frame, could Twitter make the connection that both are the same user? Was there enough backtracking stored in their systems to know that?

They may not have a literal field for the account, but they are asking twitter to run a simple join across database fields for matching IP addresses in the time range. The jusge is clearly fed up with twitters bullshit - the control F comment does actually make a lot of sense, it should be that simple. For example, SELECT * FROM dms WHERE ip=donaldtrumpsaccountip

If the the IP is "the White House" there may be dozens of clients running out that single NAT IP. So you'd need a bit more correlation before you hit all of them with a warrant, I'd think. Some tracking cookie or some ID to show it's the same person behind the keyboard. As the transcript shows, the judge asked about payment (like a credit card # for correlation) but Twitter is free.

Not saying it's a viable technique but I get the idea that judges hate warrants that vague.

If you log into both accounts using the twitter mobile app there is most likely a device ID now associated with the accounts.

Sure, but as others have said, you have device IDs, you have when Trump was traveling and using cellular data, etc. So there is a huge amount of info that can be used to relate accounts.

Legally, it seems asking for a company to run essentially joins across their DB tables is accepted practice. Otherwise, how could warrant be obtained from google for all devices within a specific geolocation? Requires at least a few DB queries I'd imagine.

A smoothed out device ID makes more sense. Thanks.

They should be able to trivially determine, after the fact, that the two accounts were using the same IP, even if not at the time. (Of course, that doesn’t _necessarily_ mean they’re the same person).

Of course they have affiliated accounts - you can get banned from Twitter for ban evasion, so they most have something to put the two together.

Twitter is playing games about turning over all the records requested by the government.

They are pretending that a database search for an IP address, for example, in two different tables is a big challenge and requires them to "make" the data because they don't have all the matching IP addresses pre-queried.

Twitter is likely doing this because musk is now in charge, and wants to help the criminal conspiracy by hiding and denying the legally requested evidence

"Special Counsel Obtained Trump’s Direct Messages on Twitter"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/politics/trump-twitter...

Judging by the dates, content, and mention of asking the NARA for the individuals assigned to the account...

I'm pretty sure this is record of what it took for the special counsel investigation to get access to the DMs of @realDonaldTrump.

Judging by the multiple mentions of @realDonaldTrump account and Trump himself throughout the document as well, I'd agree.

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