The New York Law Journal reports that in making his ruling, criminal court Judge Matthew Sciarrino told Malcolm Harris: ‘The constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts. What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.’
The information requested covers a three-month period in which Mr Harris posted material connected to an Occupy Wall Street protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge on 1 October 2011. The data is wanted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for its prosecution of a disorderly conduct charge against Mr Harris.

Constitutional rights

Twitter applied on 7 May to quash the subpoena, while civil liberties groups also filed as amicus curiae in support of Mr Harris, calling the 20 April decision by Judge Sciarrino to throw out Mr Harris’ own attempts to challenge the subpoena contrary to case law and in violation of his constitutional rights.
Judge Sciarrino rejected the claims, stating: ‘If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world.’ He added that Twitter agreed in 2010 to supply the Library of Congress with every tweet since the site's inception.
Hearing gossip online is akin to hearing gossip in the street, ruled the judge. ‘Today, the street is an on-line, information superhighway, and the witnesses can be the third-party providers like Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, Pinterest, or the next hot social media application,’ he said.

Founding fathers

The judge added that US ‘founding fathers’ such as Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson ‘would have loved to tweet their opinions as much as they loved to write for the newspapers of their day (sometimes under anonymous pseudonyms similar to today's twitter user names).’
But the judge then added a note of caution. ‘Those men, and countless soldiers in service to this nation, have risked their lives for our right to tweet or to post an article on Facebook; but that is not the same as arguing that those public tweets are protected.’
Jeffrey Vanacore and John Roche of Seattle-based Perkins Coie represented Twitter, while Mr Harris was represented by New York lawyer Martin Stolar.