Twitter renews privacy fight in Occupy Wall Street case
Twitter today renewed its privacy defense of a user accused of disorderly conduct during an Occupy Wall Street protest last October, telling a New York appeals court that police failed to comply with the U.S. Constitution's safeguards when trying to access his account.
A lower court's ruling in June that user "tweets are unprotected by the federal and New York constitutions is still erroneous," Twitter said in a brief filed this morning.
Prosecutors want Twitter to turn over "any and all user information, including e-mail address, as well as any and all tweets" -- that's language from two subpoenas sent by the district attorney's office -- posted by an activist named Malcolm Harris. Harris is being prosecuted for disorderly conduct as the result of an October 2011 protest and march on the Brooklyn Bridge that resulted in over 700 arrests. His bio says he has "been active in OWS since the first planning meetings," and he's said publicly that Occupy Wall Street activists should be "directly antagonistic."
