14 DAY TRIAL // In what is, unfortunately, rather rare, Twitter is once again stepping up to defend its users against the ever curious eyes of the US government. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and everyone else constantly get requests to hand over information on their users.
Twitter is a particularly targeted company since plenty of people use the site to have their voices heard. The US government wants to hear those voices as well, but it also wants email addresses, names, IPs and so on.
In this latest case, the New York district attorney's office asked Twitter for three-month worth of tweets as well as other info from user @destructuremal aka Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester where he was arrested along with 700 others.
This was to help with a lawsuit the prosecution filed in January. Harris was arrested for disorderly conduct and argued that people were allowed onto the bridge by the police, in his defense. The prosecution asked for tweets sent during the incident which they believe would contradict his defense.
Twitter informed the user of the request to give him a chance of fighting back. But when Harris went to a judge to quash the court order, his request was refused by the judge who reckoned that he has no right to ask for protection of his own tweets since they were owned by Twitter now, according to the site's terms of service.
That, quite obviously, is not true, Twitter only retains the right to publish your tweets and display them on the site and in apps, but, as the terms of service actually say, your tweets are your own.
This is why Twitter has now moved to quash the order itself, arguing that it shouldn't be forced to hand over the data and that people should have the freedom to protect it.
Specifically, it believed that the order forced Twitter to break the law and would force it to hand out info to anyone that requested it. What's more, it also moved to quash the order that banned Harris from defending himself from the initial request. It believes that having it stand would force Twitter to defend its users always, even if the users themselves will always be in a better position to argue in their favor.