Twitter Appeals Ruling in Battle Over Occupy Wall Street Protester鈥檚 Information
Twitter just filed its brief appealing a June decision by a New York criminal court judge requiring the company to give the Manhattan District Attorney detailed information on the communications of Twitter user Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester charged with disorderly conduct in connection with a march on the Brooklyn Bridge.
As we did before, the 老澳门开奖结果 will file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Twitter. You can find Twitter鈥檚 brief from today here; the 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 brief will be available here later today. Last week, as well.
It was great news when Twitter filed its own motion in May to quash the DA鈥檚 subpoena after the court ruled that Harris had no standing to challenge the subpoena. Twitter should be commended for taking that bold step. But Twitter shouldn鈥檛 have even been forced to take it.
Under the First and Fourth Amendments, we have the right to speak freely on the Internet, safe in the knowledge that the government cannot obtain information about our communications or our private information unless law enforcement first satisfies First Amendment scrutiny and obtains a warrant showing probable cause. The DA didn鈥檛 do that here. Instead, it has tried to avoid these constitutional hurdles by issuing a mere subpoena for Harris鈥檚 Twitter information.
The courts shouldn鈥檛 permit this. The information demanded by the DA includes not only the contents of Harris鈥檚 tweets, but his private subscriber information 鈥 including the IP addresses he used to access Twitter over three-plus months, which can reveal his physical location throughout that entire period. The government also asked for the date, time, and duration of each of his Twitter sessions. By denying Twitter鈥檚 and Harris鈥檚 challenge, the court held that the government can access this wealth of sensitive personal information without satisfying basic constitutional protections. That isn鈥檛 right.
Just as disturbing, the court affirmed its earlier ruling that people like Harris to protect their own constitutional rights when it comes to the Internet because, according to the court, we give up our constitutional rights whenever we provide information to a third-party Internet service like Twitter.
As we discuss in our friend-of-the-court brief, that holding is contrary to decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts around the country. Those cases make clear that individuals whose constitutional rights are implicated by government requests for information to third parties (such as Twitter) have standing to challenge those requests. That principle must apply to Internet activities as well. Although Twitter has admirably defended its user鈥檚 rights in this case, we cannot expect that Internet companies will have either the resources or the incentives to go to court over every one of the thousands of government subpoenas that they receive.
We鈥檙e hopeful that Twitter鈥檚 appeal will overturn the criminal court鈥檚 dangerous decision, and reaffirm that we retain our constitutional rights to speech and privacy online, as well as offline.
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