Judge: Twitter must release account data of arrested user

A judge has ordered Twitter to release three months of data from the account of a user being prosecuted for disorderly conduct related to an Occupy Wall Street protest on the Brooklyn Bridge last October.
The district attorney's office in New York City wants Twitter to turn over basic user information from Malcolm Harris' Twitter account (@destructuremal), and his tweets. Harris' motion to quash the subpoena to Twitter was denied by the criminal court of the city of New York on the grounds that Harris had no proprietary interest in the user information on his Twitter account. Twitter challenged the subpoena, saying users own their Twitter data under the site's terms of service.

This weekend, the criminal court of the city and county of New York disagreed and stood by the initial order. "We are pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the tweets at issue must be turned over," Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel R. Alonso said in a statement. "We look forward to Twitter's complying and to moving forward with the trial."
When asked for comment, a Twitter spokeswoman provided this statement: "We are disappointed in the judge's decision and are considering our options. Twitter's Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users *own* their content. We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights."
Civil rights groups ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Citizen had argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that because Twitter knows the IP addresses of users, the court would be enabling prosecutors to bypass the need for a search warrant as typically required when seeking location information if a subpoena was granted. The subpoena seeking three months of Twitter data violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the EFF argued.
But in his opinion, Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino, Jr. wrote that Twitter users have no reasonable expectation of privacy because the tweets are public. Twitter must release all of the data for September 15 to December 30, 2011, but prosecutors will need a search warrant to get data from December 31, 2011, because it is within 180 days from the ruling, the judge said.
From the decision: