I am pleased how X/Twitter responded to this request.
X/Twitter notified the person, sent a copy of the the subpoena, suggested legal representation, provided recommendations, and defied the NYPD order of silence.
X/Twitter notified the person, sent a copy of the the subpoena, suggested legal representation, provided recommendations, and defied the NYPD order of silence.
> The notification included a copy of the subpoena, which warned X not to tell Clancy of its existence. "You are not to disclose or notify any customer or third party of the existence of this subpoena or that records were provided pursuant to this subpoena," the document read.
> But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union.
When the police dept wrote: "You are not to disclose or notify any customer..." is that a legal demand backed by law, or simply a request? I wish I knew more. I suspect it is a request, and that is why Twitter would ignore it. I am sure that Twitter has very conservative internal and external legal counsel to advise on these matters. Plus, there must be many, many of these requests from NYPD.
If it's not backed by a court order, it's a polite request.
But even when it's a court demand, companies have several different counter-measurements. For example, they can tell the court "we can't provide data because we don't have that data" (Signal does this), or "we do have that data, but extracting it is resource-intensive, so the court should pay up" (some of the "Twitter Files" were precisely about this), or straight up ignoring non-American court orders (this is or at least was Reddit's general policy).
The police overreached here, and the only thing that protected the victim was, of all things, Twitter.
The police are supposed to be the good guys, but that obviously wasn't the case here. My comment was merely expressing surprise at the irony of the situation.
While it’s certainly nice to have, we shouldn’t have an expectation that a private business to defend us from the corruption of the police. Like, that’s a much bigger problem that Twitter does or doesn’t do
It's not at all designed to protect the public; in the US the police don't even have a legal duty to protect the public. It's designed to enforce the law.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/cvs-rite-aid-walgree...
There should be consequences when large service providers fail to protect the rights of their customers. Walgreens/CVS are pretty close to a duopoly.
The NYPD may have pulled this request to avoid scrutiny, but they probably didn't pull all the similar requests that succeeded. The problem is that it's impossible to generate standing in the court if you can't know about their requests.