Have You Occupied Wall Street? NYC Wants Your Twitter Data

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The DA's office has sent subpoenas to Twitter asking for the data of a handful of people arrested last year as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Twitter has been sending those users the text of the subpoenas via email.

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Jeff Rae, an Occupier who received one of those emails, decided to publish it online.

URGENT: The District Attorney in NY has subpoenaed my twitter account ow.ly/9BmsC #ows #occupywallst #occupywallstreet

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— Jeff Rae (@jeffrae) March 12, 2012

"We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process. . .requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @jeffrae," reads the email. "The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account."

In the email, Twitter goes on to notify Rae that the company will respond to New York's subpoena in seven days, unless he notifies Twitter that he intends to "quash" the legal process. It also suggests that Rae "may wish" to speak with a lawyer about the matter.

Attached to Twitter's email was the subpoena itself, in which Twitter is "commanded" to hand over "all public tweets" from mid-September to the end of October of last year.

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http://news.yahoo.com/occupied-wall-street-nyc-wants-twitter-data-2...

[Achilles Asheelz]

Now this is bullshit.  There should be some format to combat the overwhelming leverage they have.  I know on computers you can use "anonymous" services to shield you from being tracked or leveraged against: http://www.anonymizer.com/  or  http://www.proxeasy.com/webclient.aspx

In this case I'd create, say, a GOOGE E-MAIL account while using an anonymous service (so Google can't correlate your IP), create a twitter account using the same, and tweet through the anonymous interface.  I'm sure there is a way to connect to said services via cellphones - the only issue is they could dig through the logs of the cellphone companies and start making connections.  The UP-SIDE is they'd have nothing substantial in the court of law because there would be nothing to connect the dots.  Anonymous services delete their log files or don't even bother logging - so the trail would dead-end.  They could 'conclude' you're connected to that account, but they'd have no solid evidence.

Obviously they want to give the government more power on the internet, but I think it should be just the opposite.  The world requires truly anonymous services for individuals to communicate without fear of repercussions and injustice.

At this juncture this is more of a call to my tech-savvy brethren than anything else.  This kind of crap pisses me off.  Tie this with how the tech-world was manipulated during the entire wiki-leaks event and it paints a very dark picture.  There needs to be some push-back.

[Terry Bain]

I am less than confident that there is any 100% foolproof way to be "anonymous" - that is why I post under by own name, with my own picture (kind of going with the John Hancock, legendary "So King George can read it without his glasses" school of thought.)  That being said, I concur that 1.) GOOD government should have no need to be tracking peaceful, constitutional protest, and 2.) Efforts to make tracking as hard as possible by BAD government is a tactic that is worthy of liberal support. 

Here's to the proverbial 12 year old hacker that can circumvent a bazillion dollars worth of alleged computer "security."  If that security flaw can be identified and expoloited by a relatively harmless kid, it stands to reason that kid is doing us a service by finding problems that could also be exploited by not-so harmless individuals, foreign and domestic.