Judge orders Twitter to reveal Occupy protester’s tweets in Brooklyn Bridge case

Twitter has to sing like a canary.

A Manhattan judge today ordered the micro-blogging site to turn over three months worth of tweets that had been sent by an Occupy Wall Street protestor arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in October, ruling that his right to privacy would not be violated.

In fact, protester Malcolm Harris had wanted the whole world to see his tweets -- even though he'd subsequently deleted them, Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. wrote in his decision today.

"There can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in a tweet sent around the world," Sciarrino wrote.

"If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy," he wrote. "There is no proprietary interest in your tweet, which you have now gifted to the world.

"This is not the same as a private email, a private direct message, a private chat, or any of the other readily available ways to have a private conversation via the internet that now exist," he wrote, noting that if prosecutors want access to these sorts of private dialogues, they would have to go the extra step of securing a search warrant, signed by a judge.

Sciarrino ordered that the tweets most relevant to Harris' OWS protests be turned over to Manhattan prosecutors, who say they want to use them at trial to show that OWS protesters knew they were not allowed to march on the bridge roadway -- an alleged violation for which some 700 protesters were charged with disorderly conduct.

Harris should have known that a number of online services can bring zapped tweets back from the dead, the judge wrote.

"Even when a user deletes his or her tweets there are search engines available such as "Untweetable," "Tweleted" and "Politwoops" that hold users accountable for everything they had publicly tweeted and later deleted," the social media-savvy judge noted.

"We are pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the tweets at issue must be turned over,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. “We look forward to Twitter’s complying and to moving forward with the trial.”

Harris takes his disorderly conduct case to trial in December, said his lawyer, Martin Stolar, who represents arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters through the National Lawyers Guild. "We're obviously disappointed," he said of the ruling. "Do we want the government to have easy access to everything you've aid in a three months period, or do we want to put up some bars," such as requiring a search warrant, "to make it a little more difficult?" he said.

Harris had said throughout his court case that the tweets would not be very compelling, but said he was fighting to keep them private on principle.

"We are disappointed in the judge's decision and are considering our options," Twitter said in a statement. "Twitter's Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users ‘own’ their content,” the company said. “We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights."

Source : nypost.com