A judge from New York has demanded that Twitter provide all of the messages posted from the account of Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street militant, along with any other related data. The reason for this investigation is to see if this person was involved in an event that occurred during a demonstration some months ago.
According to the judge, messages posted on Twitter are not to be considered as protected as the mail and, for this reason, they are not under any legal protection for correspondence. Malcolm Harris initially tried to represent himself in court, but the Court of Law stated that according to the Terms of Use reported on the site, messages posted on Twitter are not property of the author anymore, and rather they become Twitter’s, who didn’t waste time and hastened to defend its user. At the moment he has lost his first motion, but he’s arranging to file an appeal. The lawyers of Twitter are not daunted by this matter and are convinced about their standing.
«We must fight for our users» — wrote Twitter’s Legal Counsel Ben Lee — «For this reason, we decided to appeal this decision that, in our opinion, doesn’t take equally into account the rights of users and the need to defend other rights». According to Ben Lee, if Twitter provides the IP address, login and all of the messages that were sent and received from Malcolm Harris’ Twitter account @destructuremal, it would constitute a serious privacy violation and this cannot be allowed.