NEW YORK — Twitter on Tuesday took a stand on behalf of a user and Occupy Wall Street protester whose account had been subpoenaed by the Manhattan District Attorney.
The San Francisco-based microblogging company filed a motion in New York City criminal court seeking to quash an order that would force it to turn over personally identifiable account information of Malcolm Harris, a New York-based writer and prankster who was one of around 700 arrested during the October 2011 clash between Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and police on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Harris was later charged with disorderly conduct and released, but unlike many other “Occupy” protesters, his case drew the intense scrutiny of the Manhattan District Attorney, which filed a subpoena to Twitter on January 26 asking the company to turn over “[a]ny and all user information, including email address,” and three months worth of tweets from Harris’ account, then called “@destructuremal.”
Twitter informed Harris of the subpoena a few days later and Harris challenged it in February, but in late April, criminal court judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. rejected the challenge and again ordered Twitter to hand over Harris’ account information.
At the time, it appeared as though Harris had exhausted all his best options to hold onto his information.
But on Tuesday, Twitter abruptly stepped up to the plate with its own extensive motion to quash the court’s order.
Twitter’s motion, filed by corporate law firm Perkins Coie, claims that the subpoena should, in fact, be quashed, because of three existant legal doctrines: The Stored Communications Act, the Uniform Act and the Fourth Amendment.
As Twitter points out, the Manhattan DA didn’t obtain a search warrant, and according to the Stored Communications Act, “content less than 180 days old may only be disclosed pursuant to a search warrant, id., yet the Order compels Twitter to shortly produce a multitude of content that will not be more than 180 days old until sometime this summer.”
Twitter notes that in the past, this type of disclosure has been found to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Further, Twitter notes that the under the Uniform Act, New York law enforcement “cannot compel production of documents from a California resident like Twitter without presenting the appropriate certification to a California court.”
The ACLU and Web user privacy advocates applauded Twitter’s action, with the ACLU’s Aden Fine writing on the organization’s blog:
This is a big deal. Law enforcement agencies–both the federal government and state and city entities–are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to obtain information about what people are doing on the Internet. And while the individual Internet users can try to defend their rights in the rare circumstances in which they find out about the requests before their information is turned over, that may not be enough…If Internet users cannot protect their own constitutional rights, the only hope is that Internet companies do so.
Harris, too, celebrated Twitter’s stand on his behalf on his new account on the website, @BigMeanInternet, tweeting: “Oh sweet, it’s public. Twitter motioned to quash my subpoena all on their own, saying that I do retain rights to my content,” and later: “I’m thinking this bodes well for my request currently in to Twitter PR to borrow one of their giant blue birds and ride it into court.”
It’s unclear how the judge will rule on Twitter’s filing, but Harris’ trial is scheduled for June 13, and he’s optimistic, as he told TPM: “Yeah I’m feeling pretty good about the message this sends to activists in the US, that Twitter’ll hold to the same policies they do abroad.”
Twitter itself stated that its move was conducive with its user agreements, telling TPM in an emailed statement: “As we said in our brief, “Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users *own* their content.” Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”
Twitter attorney Benjamin Lee also tweeted: “Yesterday we filed a motion in NYC to defend a user’s voice…#corevalues.”
Indeed, despite claims that its new country-by-country content policy was akin to censorship, Twitter has been one of the more exemplary companies when it comes to defending user rights, previously fighting a subpoena of an Occupy Boston protester’s account information and court orders for Wikileaks supporters’ information.
