Twitter Ruling: Should Tweets Be Protected or Considered Public Info?

By Karla Robinson
April 25, 2012

Your tweets are now less protected following a decision by New York Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. who ruled prosecutors need not obtain a subpoena for deleted tweets, since “they are considered public information owned by a third party,” reports TG Daily.
This decision is strongly opposed by Martin Stolar, a lawyer representing Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris who was arrested for disorderly conduct.
“There’s a whole other recent series of decisions from Supreme Court and New York State, about whether or not using a GPS device to track someone uses a warrant,” Stolar told the Atlantic Wire. “People’s locations while on the street are generally public, like tweets are, but it’s the accumulation of all that information, like someone’s whereabouts, that the courts have said a subpoena is necessary … I think that’s more analogous to tweets than the bank records are.”
Stolar is working to reject a subpoena of Harris’s user information and three months’ worth of tweets.

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