Twitter hands over messages at heart of Occupy case | Hacker News Reader

Twitter hands over messages at heart of Occupy case

bbc.co.uk

61 pointsanons201136 comments

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.

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...

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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. "

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?

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

Iceland

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?

I emigrated from the US leaving friends and family behind four years ago for just this reason.

I emigrated from the US leaving friends and family behind

To which place? What are the laws there about subpoenas of the records of online interaction?

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.

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

Can you point to an example where the legal system was changed so easily through protests, and say why that applies here?

It took fifty years of a well executed and persistent legal strategy to go from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education. Plessy lost the test case and had to pay the fine. The equivalent here is to pay $1B in fines.

I'm not saying that fear of terrorism or other boogeymen is as entrenched as racism was in 1896, but if it was that easy to change, we wouldn't have the TSA and all this other nonsense. We wouldn't be instituting policies that erode privacy, the same way the UK has been over the past couple of decades. I remember when I was a kid, and people talked about the stuff happening in the UK as if it was on the moon. Now that's normal. I would love it if that changed, if someone would put in the sort of effort the NAACP did from 1909 to 1954. But, I don't expect twitter to risk bankruptcy doing it.

Even if the founders are completely selfless and willing to throw away their fortunes, they'd probably feel that they have a responsibility to their employees to not run the company into the ground to prove a political point. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even possible to do it, given twitter's legal obligations. The VCs might be able to step in and get management removed if they start burning money on political causes. And, if they're going to do that, why shouldn't they just donate it to starving children in Africa? Because it's not their money, not in that sense. It's one thing for Bill Gates to take the money he's made off of MS stock and spend it on causes he supports. It's an entirely different thing for the CEO of a company to use company funds to support the same causes.

I should point out that, at least the NAACP managed to accomplish something, which doesn't always happen. I have radical leftist friends. They go to protests, get beaten up by the police despite protesting peacefully, and are often charged with crimes, so that it will look like they're just trying to get out of something if they complain about the police. It's been happening for decades, and nothing has changed. It's possible to make a stand, and for no one to care.

The alternate headline, call it the fox news headline, if you like, goes something like this

Twitter CEO refuses to pay fine yet again, company is held in contempt again. Twitter's complete disregard for the legal system comes on the heels of . . .

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

Not quite... It's law.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

It seems to me that the appeal is already a form of contest.

Appeals aren't over. Miranda got his conviction overturned because his civil rights were denied. The law moves slow, but it does move.

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