In the trial of a Occupy Wall Street protestor, Twitter has taken center stage. New York State Supreme Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. has demanded the social networking company hand over the tweets of Malcolm Harris (@destructuremal) or turn over their financial records to have a fine assessed.
In turn, Twitter, Inc. and civil liberties attorneys have said the ruling could prove to be landmark and they should be allowed to at least appeal the order. Sciarriono disagrees. He claims his order is completely valid and has stopped Twitter’s attempts at appealing.
At issue is whether or not Tweets are private and who, the tweeter or Twitter, actually “owns” them.
Twitter previously contended that because the messages were created by Harris, they belonged to him and efforts to recover them should go through him. When the judge ordered Twitter to hand them over, Harris seemingly agreed, attempting himself to block the order. But his attempt was denied because it was determined it wasn’t his place to block the judge’s demands of Twitter.
Twitter, then, reasons that they should be able to block or at least appeal the demand. So far, their reasoning has fallen on deaf ears.
Twitter “is interested in having a fair hearing on this issue, it’s a novel issue,” the company’s lawyer Terryl L. Brown told Sciarrino, saying it wanted more time to appeal his June 30 ruling. Sciarrino said his hearing was a fair one, and the company has already had 73 days to comply with his order.
“It’s pretty outrageous that the D.A.’s office wants to prohibit Twitter from exercising its right to appeal,” said one lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild, representing Harris.
Harris is on trial for the events of October 1, 2011 where hundreds of Occupy protestors were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. Harris, and others, claim the NYPD led them to the bridge by telling them could protest there and then corralled them in order to execute the massive arrests. The tweets in question are from that day and surrounding dates, in an attempt to prove whether or not Harris knew the march to the bridge was illegal.
Twitter has logically stated that if the government has a right to the tweets, if they are “public” information from the moment of transmission, then they shouldn’t need a court order to get them. But it seems as if the prosecutor and the judge, in this case, would like to set a precedence—one where personal privacy rights are circumvented with no checks or balances in place.
About David Matson