Tagged: Blogs

We previously reported on the New York District Attorney’s attempts to obtain tweets by a criminal defendant in People of the State of New York v. Harris, Index No. 080152/2011 on May 23, 2012 and the corresponding challenges asserted by the individual user/defendant and Twitter itself on June 7, 2012. The Court first denied defendant’s motion to quash the subpoena served on the social networking site Twitter, ruling that the defendant, charged with disorderly conduct after allegedly marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge during an Occupy Wall Street protest, had no reasonable expectation of privacy in communications of this type and lacked standing to seek the protections of the Stored Communications Act. Seeing its user fail in his efforts to quash the subpoena, Twitter took the matter into its own hands, moving for the same relief as defendant and ultimately obtaining the same result. The more recent decision, which addressed Twitter’s challenges, raised considerable buzz in legal and social media circles as a case of first impression because it concerned (1) a criminal rather than a civil matter and (2) a motion by a social media site rather than an individual user.

A few weeks ago, we reported on the recent decision of the People of the State of New York v. Harris, Index No. 080152/2011, (Crim. Ct. Apr. 20, 2012). There, the Court denied defendant Malcolm Harris’s motion to quash the District Attorney’s subpoena requiring the production of defendant’s user information, email addresses, as well as any Tweets posted for a four-month period from Twitter, Inc., all in connection with criminal charges pending against Mr. Harris due to his alleged involvement in an Occupy Wall Street protest. You can read our most recent blog post on this case from May 23. Twitter subsequently moved to quash the Court’s order on May 7, 2012, on the basis that the order imposes an undue burden upon it pursuant to Section 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 2701-2711) (the “SCA”), which provides that “[a] court issuing an order pursuant to this section, on a motion made promptly by the service provider, may quash or modify such order, if. . . compliance with such order otherwise would cause an undue burden on such provider.” Twitter argues that compliance with the Court’s order compelling the production of defendant’s Twitter user information imposes an undue burden for at least three reasons.

In a recent case before the Criminal Court of the State of New York, the prosecution served a subpoena duces tecum on Twitter, Inc., seeking user information including the e-mail address and Tweets for a two-month period under the Twitter account, @destructuremal, which was believed to be that of the defendant Malcolm Harris. The People of the State of New York v. Harris, Index No. 080152/2011, (Crim. Ct. Apr. 20, 2012). Mr. Harris had been charged with disorderly conduct after allegedly marching on to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge during an Occupy Wall Street protest. The prosecution sought to refute Mr. Harris’s expected defense that the police led him into stepping on to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, by examining his contradictory, contemporaneous Tweets.