Twitter fights subpoena for Occupy protester’s tweets

Occupy Wall street protesters gather in Zuccotti Park in New York City in October 2011. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)

The Associated Press

Twitter is resisting an attempt by prosecutors to gain access to the message history of a writer and activist who was arrested during Occupy Wall Street protests last fall.

The San Francisco-based micro-blogging service filed court papers Monday asking a judge to quash a subpoena in which the Manhattan district attorney had ordered it to produce months-worth of old tweets, now deleted, that had been posted by Malcolm Harris, who was among 700 people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge during a march on October 1.

Among other things, prosecutors want to look at all of Harris’s tweets in the weeks before and months after the march against financial inequality. Those tweets, prosecutors said, might show whether Harris, managing editor for The New Inquiry online magazine, was aware that police had ordered demonstrators not to march across the bridge.

Harris already tried to fight the subpoena on his own and lost on an eyebrow-raising technicality. A New York judge ruled that Harris didn’t have legal standing to fight the subpoena because he didn’t own the tweets, Twitter did.

Judge Matthew Sciarrino wrote in his April decision that once Harris posted his messages they became the property of Twitter and that any constitutional protection he had over their disclosure disappeared.

“While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical ‘home’ on the Internet,” Sciarrino wrote. He also reasoned that Twitter was free to redistribute its customers’ tweets “to anyone, any way and for any reason it chooses.”

Twitter’s lawyers, in their court filing on Monday, said the judge misunderstood how the service works.

Twitter customers like Harris, they wrote, don’t relinquish ownership of their messages or photos by posting them on the service. The company also argued that a federal law, the Stored Communications Act, expressly gave users of services like Twitter the right to challenge demands for their account records. Twitter’s attorneys also wrote that recent court decisions require law enforcement officials to get search warrants in cases like this.

“As we said in our brief, Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content,” Twitter’s legal counsel, Ben Lee, said in a statement. “Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

Harris’ lawyer, Martin Stolar, said he and Harris were “delighted” that Twitter had chosen to get involved in fighting the records request.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney declined to comment. In previous legal filings, prosecutors have argued that Harris had “no proprietary or privacy interest in tweets that he broadcast to every person with access to the Internet.”

 

Roofer dives into vat of acid to save colleague

An American roofer made an astonishing leap of faith for a co-worker by jumping into a vat of nitric acid to save his life.

Martin Davis, 44, fell 40 feet into a tank of nitric acid while working on the roof of a metal tube manufacturing plant in Clifton, New Jersey, US, and was in severe danger when he became fully submerged in the waist-high liquid.

Mr Davis was airlifted to hospital after falling 40 feet into a vat of nitric acid.

Fortunately Mr Davis was saved by the actions of quick-thinking colleague Rob Nuckols, who jumped into the vat after him, pulling him out with the help of three other colleagues. Rescue workers cut Mr Davis out of his clothes and doused him in water to limit burns and he was later airlifted in hospital.

He was said to be incoherent and in shock after sustaining a broken rib, a punctured lung and burns on his legs and side in the fall. Despite his injuries his brother John Davis remained defiant, telling ‘The Record’ that “he will fight right through this”.

“They had him on a breathing apparatus,” he said. “His condition is not so good. But he’s a young guy. He’ll pull through.”

Mr Davis (pictured right) was in a “serious” condition on his admission to hospital.

Co-worker Rob Nuckols declined to comment after the incident but told firefighters, “I had to get him out of there”.

Fire officials heralded the bravery shown by Mr Nuckols, who suffered burns on his legs and abdomen in the incident but was later released from hospital.