By Jonathan Peters
Follow me @jonathanwpeters on Twitter.
Your tweets are no different from bank records, a New York judge ruled Monday. Prosecutors had subpoenaed an Occupy protestor’s tweets after he was arrested in the fall during a Brooklyn Bridge protest. The judge was ruling on the protestor’s motion to quash the subpoena, which sought “user information, including email address,” and three months of tweets from the protestor’s Twitter feed. As Adam Martinwrote in The Atlantic:
Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. wrote that there was no precedent in New York for an order to quash a subpoena to a “third-party online social networking service seeking to obtain the defendant’s user information and postings.” But he wrote that “an analogy may be drawn to the bank record cases where courts have consistently held that an individual has no right to challenge a subpoena issued against the third-party bank.” Sciarrino ruled that [the protestor] couldn’t quash the subpoena, but he didn’t necessarily rule that the tweets or other information would be admissible as evidence.
[Read more…] about So Your Tweets are no Different Than Bank Records, huh?